From ‘Right After the Midterms’ to Before Them: The White House Asks for Iran Strike Options It Can Use Before November 3

The White House has asked the Pentagon for options to strike targets in Iran before the November 3 midterms, according to a report in The Atlantic on October 7. US Central Command, which runs operations in the Middle East, is preparing specific plans.

The request is a change in calendar. In September the Wall Street Journal reported that Trump had told aides a bombing campaign was likely after the midterms. On October 2 he told a rally the war would end “one way or another … probably right after the midterms.” Now the planning includes the weeks before the vote.

Why Strike Before the Vote

The US has held off on strikes in recent weeks. The pause is widely read as political: the war has kept fuel and consumer prices high, and the president’s numbers have fallen with them. Democrats lead the generic ballot by 7 to 10 points, and Trump told Nebraska last week that war-driven fuel and fertilizer prices are “a small price to pay.”

Supporters of a strike see a way out. A limited operation, in their view, would let Trump show results against Iran. One Republican official told The Atlantic, in effect, that hitting Iran before the midterms could make it look as if Trump is winning the war and gas prices are starting to come down.

Why It Might Not Work

The same report describes doubts inside the administration.

• Limited strikes, limited effect: Officials question whether a limited strike can bring Iran to the table, restore safe shipping through Hormuz, and lower gasoline prices at the same time.
• Exposure: Renewed strikes invite Iranian retaliation against about 50,000 US troops in the region and against Gulf allies.
• Stockpiles: More strikes would further draw down US munitions.
• The oil record: The Atlantic cites Energy Information Administration data showing that global oil prices generally rose when the US resumed strikes after a pause.

Will Walldorf, a professor of international relations at Wake Forest University, told the magazine that military action has not lowered oil prices and has done the opposite. If the war is unpopular even among Republican voters, he asked, how does using it to rally the base work?

The pre-election strike argument rests on an assumption the war’s own record contradicts: that hitting Iran lowers gas prices. Resumptions have generally pushed crude up first, because the market prices retaliation and Hormuz risk before it prices any outcome. A strike in mid-October would land two to three weeks before the vote — long enough for the spike, not long enough for any reopening of the strait to show up at the pump. That is why the request matters for markets even if no strike follows. It moves the war’s binary event from “after November 3” into the window before it. The “one way or another” end Trump promised now has a possible date on the near side of the election.

Can Iran Outlast It?

Analysts quoted around the report expect Tehran to wait it out.

The regime has spent nearly 50 years keeping itself running under US sanctions. It knows the US is paying heavily for the blockade and escort operations, and that the political cost of those grows with time.

• Routes around the blockade: Overland and Caspian routes toward Kazakhstan and Russia; Iranian crude relabeled as Iraqi; ship-to-ship transfers on the open sea.
• Money: A US advocacy group opposed to Iran’s nuclear program alleges Tehran uses trustees in neighboring countries to move dollars and cryptocurrency out of view.
• Possible tolls: A risk analyst at ship-tracking firm Kpler raised the possibility that Gulf states, even under US escort, quietly pay Iran for safe passage, and said Iran is skilled at running a state on few resources.

Adnan Mazarei of the Peterson Institute for International Economics told CNN that Iranians’ lives are getting worse but the regime can tolerate a great deal of public suffering. There is no mechanical threshold at which the regime must fall, he said, comparing it to a patient whose fever does not automatically mean death past a given temperature.

That cuts against Trump’s case that the blockade has left Iran “completely out of money” and must soon give in.

The Other Side

A request for options is not a decision. Militaries prepare options constantly, and a White House asking CENTCOM for plans may be building leverage for the mediated talks Trump says are continuing. A credible threat of strikes before November could push Iran to offer better terms. And if a limited strike did force Iran to move on the blockade sequencing, oil could fall quickly afterward, as Trump predicts.