President Trump now says the United States is "low-keying it" with Iran, relying on a naval blockade and economic pain rather than the "massive attack" he once threatened, while acknowledging that key munitions are running short and that no direct negotiations with Tehran are actually taking place.
In a phone interview with Axios reporter Barak Ravid, Trump framed the shift as strategic patience, not retreat. "We are just watching Iran with its huge inflation and the fact they have no money," he said. "We are only semi-negotiating with them." Asked about the stalled conflict, now more than five months old, Trump offered a breezy forecast: "It will work out. It always works out. It's like a chess game."
The remarks amount to a significant course correction. Trump had previously threatened Iran with overwhelming force, repeatedly promised an "imminent" deal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, and called earlier reports of a munitions shortage "treasonous." Now he is publicly conceding that high-end weapons stocks are "a little bit tighter" and that Iran is not, in fact, sitting across the table from American negotiators.
The backdrop to Trump's pivot is a set of demands from Tehran that former Defense Secretary Mark Esper called "ridiculous" and said "should be rejected out of hand." Mohammad Bagher Zolghadr, secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council, issued the demands over the weekend. They include the withdrawal of all U.S. forces from the region, full reimbursement for the costs of the conflict, an end to the naval blockade, and the lifting of all sanctions.
Esper, appearing on ABC's This Week, did not hold back about what those terms signal.
"They haven't apparently left any room for negotiation. It shows that they believe they have the upper hand, they believe they're winning, and they are emboldened. And that's what we're up against right now after, what, five and a half months of conflict."
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi reinforced the point from Tehran's side, telling reporters that "we currently have no negotiations with America." He allowed only that "messages are being exchanged through intermediaries" and insisted: "This is not called negotiation, it's an 'exchange of messages.'" Trump had previously called Iran "unbelievably duplicitous" for publicly denying the existence of talks.
Iran has also been negotiating separately with Oman over the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz. Fox News reported that Iran says a deal with Oman on the strait's shipping lanes is in its final stages, but that the waterway will reopen only once Washington meets Tehran's conditions, conditions the U.S. has shown no willingness to accept.
The result is a diplomatic stalemate dressed up, on both sides, as progress.
While Trump emphasizes economic leverage, the military reality behind his restraint is harder to spin. Deputy War Secretary Steve Feinberg sent a memo to defense industry leaders, obtained by the Washington Post, imploring them to urgently ramp up production and delivery of weapons, "including munitions that are in extreme shortage due to the war with Iran." Feinberg gave contractors just three weeks to submit plans to "drive significantly faster, more aggressive delivery schedules and/or increased production for critical capabilities."
Trump himself, at a signing session last week, acknowledged the strain, though he tried to soften it. "We have certain types of munitions which may not be as accurate. They're not as elite," he said, before adding that the remaining stocks "are very powerful and very good... and we have an unlimited supply." The two statements sit uneasily together.
Esper offered a blunter assessment. "When you're talking about taking two years to build a Patriot [missile], whatever we do now is not going to help in the short term," he said. He traced the problem back decades, to post-Cold War drawdowns and the long campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, but said the last six to seven months had accelerated the crisis. "We've now found ourselves considerably low with regard to interceptors such as Patriot and THAAD, and to some ground attack weapons as well."
The former defense secretary's sharpest concern was not Iran itself but what the shortage signals to Beijing. "When I look at the world, I'm most concerned about China and the messages it may be sending there and the deterrent effect of our munition stockpiles," Esper said. A military that cannot replenish its own interceptors fast enough to keep pace with one regional conflict is not a military postured to deter a superpower.
That tension, between the Iran campaign's consumption of critical weapons and the broader demands of great-power competition, has driven internal friction within the administration for months.
Trump's bet on sanctions and blockade pressure drew pointed skepticism from Danny Citrinowicz, the former head of the Iran branch of Israel's military intelligence. Citrinowicz posted on X that Trump's approach amounted to "wishful thinking."
"Iran's economic situation is undoubtedly severe, but economic pressure alone is unlikely to force Tehran either to surrender at the negotiating table or to abandon what it considers core strategic interests, including its ability to contest control of the Strait of Hormuz."
Citrinowicz argued that Iran "has spent decades operating under intense economic pressure and has repeatedly demonstrated an ability to absorb considerable pain without fundamentally changing course." He warned that if Tehran concludes the choice is between capitulation and escalation, "its track record suggests that escalation is the more likely response."
The economic damage is real enough. The New York Post reported that bread prices in Iran have surged 140 percent, dairy is up nearly 117 percent, and overall food prices have climbed almost 114 percent. Trump has pointed to exactly these numbers as evidence that his strategy is working. But there is a wide gap between inflicting economic pain and extracting political concessions, a gap Iran has navigated, at enormous cost to its own people, for decades.
Vice President JD Vance, speaking separately, tried to project resolve. "This thing is not over," Vance said, as Newsmax reported. "We're in the middle of the game, and we're applying a whole host of tools, diplomatic, economic, military tools." Vance added: "We don't trust. We verify. We actually look not at people's words but people's deeds."
Breitbart reported that Trump has privately floated the idea of declaring victory even without a formal nuclear deal, so long as Iran's nuclear program remains contained and the Strait of Hormuz reopens. Iran, meanwhile, has appointed hardline former IRGC commander Mohsen Rezaei as secretary of the Supreme National Security Council, a move that could signal a tougher posture at the negotiating table, not a softer one.
Internal divisions within the Iranian government are complicating matters further. One faction reportedly fears economic collapse; another opposes any concessions to Washington. That split makes a clean deal harder to reach, and makes the conflict's timeline even less predictable.
Separate from the Iran standoff, the Pentagon moved to revoke the security clearance of former Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall over what it called an "unauthorized disclosure of classified information regarding Air Force One's capabilities." Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell announced the action on X.
"Safeguarding classified information is a non-negotiable duty. Those who violate that trust forfeit the privilege of access and any role requiring it."
The revocation stems from a July 9 New York Times article in which Kendall raised concerns about the new Air Force One. "Time didn't permit all the normal Air Force One modifications, so some mix of security, communications, and support is missing," Kendall told the paper. "With the Iran situation, this could be of concern. Frankly, I'm surprised to see this plane used outside the U.S."
Kendall pushed back in a text message to the Wall Street Journal: "I'm mystified. I've been extremely careful to not say anything that could be classified, and as far as I know I have not said anything classified. So far no one has told me what I'm supposed to have revealed." Trump's Justice Department initially issued subpoenas to New York Times reporters over the story but later withdrew them.
The episode raises a question the Pentagon has not answered: what specific classified information does it allege Kendall disclosed? Without that detail, the revocation looks less like accountability and more like retaliation against a former official who publicly questioned the readiness of presidential aircraft during wartime. Kendall's comments were critical, but whether they were classified remains, by the Pentagon's own silence, unresolved.
That pattern, internal clashes over who gets to speak candidly about military readiness, has become a recurring feature of the administration's handling of the Iran conflict.
The Iran stalemate is not the only pressure point. Former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, appearing on CNN, warned that Russia may be preparing to test NATO's commitment to collective defense. Panetta cited a pattern of escalating provocations: an armed Russian incursion targeting Poland last September, an armed drone aimed at Romania in May, and an explosive-laden drone found in Germany just last week that belonged to a Russian intelligence team.
"Putin will use either cyber or use drones or could possibly even use a military incursion to be able to test NATO and test Article 5 and whether NATO will respond," Panetta said. Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty holds that an armed attack on one member is an attack on all, what NATO calls an "unwavering pledge."
The Wall Street Journal reported that U.S. intelligence assesses Russia could mount some form of incursion against a NATO country within the next few years. Atlantic staff writer Anne Applebaum offered a scenario: Russia could claim it needs to rescue "oppressed Russian speakers of Latvia" as a way of "showing that NATO alliance isn't real, a 'paper tiger.'" She added that a full-scale invasion is not the concern, "the Russian army isn't able to occupy Poland", but a limited, provocative test is.
For the United States, the timing is uncomfortable. A military stretched thin by an Iran conflict that has drained interceptor stocks and ground-attack munitions is not well positioned to simultaneously deter Russian adventurism along NATO's eastern flank. Esper's warning about China applies with equal force to Russia: adversaries watch inventories, not press conferences.
The administration's earlier decisions to call off planned strikes against Iran and halt military operations in favor of diplomacy reflected, at least in part, the reality of what the arsenal could sustain. The shift to "low-keying it" may be less a strategic choice than the only option left on the table.
When a president who once promised overwhelming force starts calling his approach "low-key," the question is not whether the strategy changed, it's whether the strategy had anywhere else to go.
