A definitive resolution to this conflict — one way or the other — is still in the cards.
America is “drifting into a new kind of forever war,” Georgetown University adjunct and senior fellow at the Stimson Center Kelly Grieco proposed over the weekend: “a forever air war.”
Those who only just learned on Sunday night that the U.S. spent the weekend executing three robust waves of airstrikes on Iranian targets probably nodded along with Grieco’s observation. Not long ago, a headline like that would have dominated the news. Today, it’s one story of many, lending credence to Grieco’s implication that American airstrikes on Iranian targets have become background radiation.
And yet, there’s not much else that would be “new” about an open-ended air campaign against an Islamist terrorist adversary, which the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps very much is.
Throughout the Global War on Terror, with varying degrees of intensity, the United States has pursued a similar campaign against Al-Shabaab in Somalia, the Houthis in Yemen, the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, and the Afghan Taliban. Some of those campaigns were more decisive than others, and each theater has its own unique contours. But the “tit-for-tat attacks that normalize an open-ended air campaign” that Grieco identifies in the Strait of Hormuz should be familiar to students of U.S. tactics in the post-9/11 world.
Moreover, the targets the president and the Pentagon are selecting are not calibrated to suggest that America is engaged in a signaling exercise or is merely “mowing the lawn.”
A report via the typically read-in analysts at The Hormuz Letter indicate that the U.S. now regards Iranian infrastructure as targets of opportunity:
BREAKING: A water pumping station in Mahshahr, southwestern Iran, was struck by US airstrikes, killing one and injuring four, per the Deputy Governor of Khuzestan.
The US has now struck Iran's oil, gas, petrochemical, and water infrastructure in tonight's attacks.
— The Hormuz Letter (@HormuzLetter) July 13, 2026
That is unconfirmed, but it would constitute a significant escalation. What has been confirmed is that CENTCOM hit more than 300 targets over the last several days, “including missile and drone sites, naval capabilities, air and surface-surveillance radars, and surface-to-air missile launchers,” the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) reported. “A US official told Axios on July 12 that the US military also conducted several strikes targeting missile and air defense systems and IRGC fast attack craft at multiple locations around the strait.”
Moreover, U.S. assets are striking targets both along the coast of the strait and deep inside Iran, too. “The strikes further inland have not yet affected Iranian willingness to continue attacks into the Strait of Hormuz, though that could change, especially if the strikes are coupled with other efforts,” ISW added.
Iran retaliated by targeting what the IRGC claims were U.S. military targets inside Bahrain, Kuwait, and Jordan, as it has since the memorandum of understanding came online on June 15. In addition, the IRGC claims it attacked “long-range aerial radar and the vessel detection radar in Oman,” which threatens Muscat’s vital cooperation in what Iran hopes will be a new regional order in which Tehran enjoys prohibitive control of the strait.
“Iran is now resorting to using force against Gulf states, likely to deter them from supporting efforts that undermine Iranian efforts to secure recognition of Iran’s control over the strait,” ISW observed. “These attacks presumably also aim to coerce the Gulf states into acquiescing to Iranian control.”
This unsatisfying, low-intensity conflict can persist for a while, but it cannot go on like this “forever.” In the near term, the Iranians can continue to harass and attack shipping, and the U.S. can mitigate the damage Iran seeks to do to global energy markets by degrading its force projection capabilities in the strait and quietly escorting maritime traffic through the Omani channel. Eventually, though, the market will compel the combatants in this conflict to confront a variety of suboptimal outcomes.
Trump has already demonstrated that consistently high energy prices are his pressure point, and the “tit-for-tat” approach all but ensures that Trump will once again encounter his pain threshold soon enough. But the longer this goes on, the more Iran will lose its leverage over the strait as energy exporters establish routes and pipelines that bypass Hormuz.
This is not a condition that lends itself to a status quo defined by perpetual lawn mowing. Both sides of this conflict could be tempted to return to full-scale, region-wide hostilities, or they might be persuaded to make undesirable concessions to the increasingly unsustainable economic realities that will be the near-term result of this conflict. But the centrality of Hormuz as a geostrategic chokepoint, Iran’s remaining military capabilities, and Trump’s inconstancy suggest that a definitive resolution to this conflict — one way or the other — is still in the cards.