Not good, but we can’t just quit Iran now

While President Trump threatens to destroy “ONE BRIDGE OR POWER PLANT” in Iran for every shot they take at a ship in the Strait of Hormuz, Americans back home are hoping and praying this folly of a war wraps up yesterday.

Strikes over the weekend brought the death toll for U.S. troops to 18, with 100 more injured; the Strait of Hormuz is essentially closed again, with Iran’s Houthi allies in Yemen threatening to block other oil routes; gas prices are up 16 cents from the average a week ago, 88 cents higher than last year and $1.04 higher than the week before the war, per Politico; and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth admitted in a hearing on Tuesday that the conflict had already cost U.S. taxpayers $37.5 billion — as he asked for $67 billion more.

All of this while no one — not Hegseth, not Trump, not Secretary of State Marco Rubio or Vice President JD Vance — can tell voters how or when we plan to exit this war having achieved anything of long-term significance. It’s the very definition of a quagmire.

Meanwhile, Iran and its dangerous proxies are clearly playing the long game, hoping that upcoming American midterm elections force the U.S. to exit the war we started without accomplishing a single one of our stated objectives — a very real possibility.

Trump is posturing, as he’s wont to do, insisting he’s not influenced by the calendar. “I don’t view it as ‘Gee, we’re having an election in a period of time,’ ” he said on Tuesday. “No, the election — I can’t think about that having to do with this. I think people are very impressed.”

Not so, as a majority of Americans now say the war in Iran was the wrong decision, while a belief that the war is worth the economic cost among Trump’s MAGA base has dropped to just over a third — a 13 point drop in two months.

Voters, Republican lawmakers up for reelection, and the Iranian regime — all united in their hope that Trump can be pushed to the exits by the election politics of an unpopular war.

But for once, I hope Trump isn’t bluffing.

We shouldn’t have entered this war, and we most definitely shouldn’t have entered it without a clear strategy. But here we are, and it’s now our job to leave it responsibly.

What does that mean?

Unfortunately, it means admitting we likely can’t make good on a number of the grandiose promises Trump made to justify the war in the first place. It seems we’ve given up on the idea of regime change and liberating the Iranian people, to name two. But we can and should pursue other objectives that would leave the U.S., our allies, and the region better off.

First and foremost, we must leave with verifiable restraints on and multilateral monitoring of Iran’s nuclear program. If it’s unrealistic or costly to retrieve Iran’s buried uranium cache, we must secure a non-conditional non-proliferation agreement — with teeth.

We must leave having guaranteed unfettered access to shipping routes, from the Strait of Hormuz to the Bab el-Mandeb Strait. Our European, Asian and Gulf allies must be integrated into a joint coalition to protect international shipping lanes from repeated extortion attempts.

And we must leave our regional allies, like Kuwait, protected from retaliatory strikes through binding non-aggression commitments and a long-term off-shore carrier strike group presence to prevent a security vacuum.

This is a far cry from what Trump promised with his ill-advised and ill-prepared blunder of a war — and in the case of Hormuz, it’s merely restoring access we already had before the war. But it’s the least we should accept in our retreat.

As much as we want to get out now, we owe it to our allies, our Gulf partners, our troops — and the Iranian people — to leave this mess of our own making with something to show for it.

S.E. Cupp is the host of "S.E. Cupp Unfiltered" on CNN.