Has the Iran war been worth it?
With a Memorandum of Understanding signed and 60 days of negotiations underway, the ceasefire is too fragile and the conflict too fresh to answer that question with confidence. But an early rundown underscores what has been gained − and what it has cost − since President Donald Trump ordered strikes against Iran on Feb. 28.
At the start, he predicted a conflict that would last four or five weeks, suggesting the sort of easy victory and quick spoils that followed the U.S. operation in January to arrest Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro.
Instead, the Iran conflict is now four months old and counting, despite Trump’s regular, optimistic predictions that peace was just around the corner. As modern predecessors from Lyndon Johnson to George W. Bush have discovered before him, wars are easier to get into than out of.
The death toll reported by government agencies includes 13 U.S. service members and 26 people in Israel. In Iran, about 3,500 have lost their lives − including more than 100 children in a strike on a girls’ school on the first day of the war − as well as more than 3,500 people in Lebanon, according to government agencies in each country.
And the repercussions have rippled through the global economy, regional alliances and domestic U.S. politics, with an impact that will take months and years to fully calculate.
Trump hails the war as a triumphant use of American military might that has constrained a rogue regime and protected the world from its nuclear ambitions. But Democratic critics and some influential MAGA voices, typically Trump’s defenders, call it a misadventure that has left Tehran emboldened.
Most Americans oppose the war and are skeptical about its value. In a CBS News/YouGov poll taken June 17-19, an overwhelming 57%-21% said the conflict had “created more problems than it had solved.”
Here’s a look at five of the tradeoffs so far.
U.S. and Israeli strikes have decimated Iran’s navy and destroyed most of its air defense network. Its arsenal of ballistic missiles has been degraded.
But Tehran has retained enough small boats, drones, missiles and mines to disrupt passage through the Strait of Hormuz and threaten U.S. allies in the Persian Gulf.
For Israel, eliminating Tehran’s missile capability was a top goal from the start. That’s not one that Trump still shares.
“Am I going to let Saudi Arabia have missiles, but they can’t have them?” the president told reporters at the G7 summit in France. “Doesn’t work that way, you know; it doesn’t work that way.”
The Iran war has opened fractures in the MAGA coalition Trump forged, with some leading commentators accusing Trump of violating his “America First” campaign commitment to avoid foreign entanglements. They say his pending deal is worse than the 2015 multilateral agreement negotiated by President Barack Obama that Trump withdrew from during his first term.
“So there’s kind of no lying about this,” longtime ally Tucker Carlson said in his June 17 show on the social media platform X. “This is a pretty humiliating loss for the United States.”
Louisiana Sen. Bill Cassidy, a conservative Republican whose bid for another term was undone by Trump’s opposition, called Iran “the worst foreign policy blunder in decades.”
Trump responded by denouncing “the fools” who criticized the Memorandum of Understanding, saying on Truth Social that they were “either jealous, bad people or stupid.”
Even so, the White House felt compelled to issue a news release declaring, “President Trump‘s Iran Agreement Is America First in Action,” listing favorable quotes from GOP members of Congress, Fox News anchors, foreign leaders and even Pope Leo XIV.
Trump didn’t seek congressional authorization for the war. Now restiveness about the war’s course and the failure to consult Congress has begun to stir some opposition in the GOP.
With support from four Republicans, the Senate voted 50-48 on June 23 to bring a halt to military operations in Iran – a largely symbolic gesture. It follows a similar move by the House in a 215-208 vote on June 3.
Iran’s commitment to reopen the Strait of Hormuz for 60 days has helped calm energy markets. The average price of gas in the United States has dipped below $4 a gallon, down from a peak in May though still well above the $2.96 average before the conflict.
That’s good news not only for American consumers but also for Republican candidates running in the midterm elections. The economic anxiety shorthanded as “affordability” now ranks at the top of voter concerns, and inflation has fueled discontent with the president and his party.
As the ceasefire was announced, the war already had cost American consumers and taxpayers at least $132 billion in rising prices, interest-rate hikes and military spending, according to the economic research firm Moody’s Analytics.
Economists caution that it will take months of open and reliable transport through the strait before the costs of gas, fertilizer, food and other products return to pre-war levels. About 20% of the world’s oil had previously been passing through the narrow waterway that links the Persian Gulf with the open sea.
Still at issue is whether Iran may try to impose “user fees” once the 60-day agreement has expired.
One more thing: Opening the strait will be fixing a problem that the war created.
The war with Iran began as a joint operation between the United States and Israel, but negotiating its end has become a point of bitter contention between Trump and his longtime ally, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Trump argues that the war has protected Israel from nuclear annihilation. But Israel wasn’t privy to the draft ceasefire agreement before it was released, and it includes provisions that Netanyahu argues endangers Israel’s security.
At the G7 summit in France, Trump called Netanyahu “crazy” and deployed other expletives. In the region, Israel continued attacks on Lebanon in a clash with Hezbollah that threatened the ceasefire.
For Israel, the war has not yet achieved its fundamental objectives, including eliminating Iran’s arsenal of missiles and clearly constraining its nuclear ambitions once and for all.
File under too soon to say: The ceasefire gave two months for negotiations to settle, among other things, restrictions on Tehran’s nuclear program.
That is the top goal Trump cited in launching the war but one that isn’t addressed in the 14-page ceasefire agreement, and the United States and Iran have given different accounts on how talks on that issue are going.
Vice President JD Vance said Iran had agreed to invite United Nations nuclear inspectors back to inspect its damaged nuclear sites, calling it a “major milestone,” but Iranian officials said they had made no such new commitment.
Trump weighed in on Truth Social: “If they did not agree to this, there would be no future negotiations!” he warned, then added, “Talks are going well!”
Susan Page, the Washington Bureau chief of USA TODAY, has covered 12 presidential elections and seven presidencies. Her latest book is “The Queen and Her Presidents” (Harper, 2026).
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