Three months in, is Trump losing the Iran war?

US President Donald Trump may have won nearly every battle against Iran, but three months after launching strikes on the Islamic Republic, he faces a larger question: is he losing the war?

With Iran's grip on the Strait of Hormuz intact, its nuclear program largely unresolved and its government still standing, doubts are growing that Trump can turn tactical military success into a convincing geopolitical win, according to Reuters.

Is Trump winning or losing the Iran war?

Trump's military campaign has degraded Iran's capabilities significantly, but it has not achieved his core goals. Iran has blocked the strait, survived the assault and demonstrated it can throttle one-fifth of the world's oil and gas supplies.

Analysts say his repeated claims of complete victory ring hollow as the two sides teeter between fragile diplomacy and the threat of resumed strikes.

Trump now risks the United States and its Gulf Arab allies emerging from the conflict worse off, while Iran, though battered militarily and economically, could end up with greater leverage. Some experts leave open the possibility that Trump might still find a face-saving exit if negotiations break in his favor. But others are predicting a grim post-war outlook.

"We're three months in, and it's looking like a war that was designed to be a short-term romp for Trump is turning into a long-term strategic failure," said Aaron David Miller, a former Middle East negotiator for Republican and Democratic administrations.

Why does Trump's image make the Iran war harder to resolve?

For Trump, the stakes are personal as well as political, given his well-known sensitivity to being seen as a loser. He finds himself commander-in-chief of the world's most powerful military locked in a standoff with a second-tier power that appears convinced it has the upper hand.

That dynamic, analysts say, could make Trump more likely to resist any compromise that resembles a retreat from his maximalist positions or a repeat of the 2015 Obama-era nuclear deal he scrapped in his first term.

The White House has pushed back firmly on any suggestion of failure. Spokeswoman Olivia Wales said the US has "met or surpassed all of our military objectives in 'Operation Epic Fury,'" adding that "President Trump holds all the cards and wisely keeps all options on the table."

What domestic pressure is Trump facing over the Iran war?

Trump campaigned for a second term on a promise of avoiding unnecessary military interventions, but has drawn the US into an entanglement that risks lasting damage to his foreign policy record.

He now faces domestic pressure from high gasoline prices, low approval ratings and a Republican Party struggling to hold Congress ahead of November's midterm elections. The conflict has lasted twice the maximum six-week timeframe he laid out when he joined with Israel to start the war on February 28.

More than six weeks into a ceasefire, analysts believe Trump faces a stark choice: accept a potentially flawed deal as an off-ramp, or escalate militarily and risk a longer crisis.

Among the options if diplomacy collapses, some analysts say, would be to launch a round of sharp but limited strikes, frame it as a final victory and move on. Another possibility is that Trump could attempt to shift focus to Cuba, as he has suggested, in hopes of an easier win.

If so, he might misjudge the challenges posed by Havana, much as some Trump aides privately acknowledge he mistakenly expected the Iran operation to resemble the January 3 raid that captured Venezuela's president.

What did Trump's Iran war actually achieve?

Not all analysts share the pessimistic view. Alexander Gray, a former senior adviser in Trump's first term and now chief executive of American Global Strategies, rejected the notion that the campaign was failing. He said the heavy blow to Iranian military capabilities was itself a "strategic success," that the war had drawn Gulf states closer to the US and away from China, and that the fate of Iran's nuclear program remained to be determined.

Trump had said his objectives were to close off Iran's path to a nuclear weapon, end its ability to threaten the region and US interests, and make it easier for Iranians to overthrow their rulers. There is no sign those goals have been achieved, and many analysts say it is unlikely they will be. Early in the conflict, waves of airstrikes degraded Iran's ballistic missile stockpile, sank much of its navy and killed many top leaders, but Tehran responded by blocking the strait, sending energy prices soaring and attacking Israel and Gulf neighbors.

Has Iran's nuclear program been stopped?

Trump's main stated war aim, Iran's denuclearization, remains unfulfilled. Tehran has shown little willingness to significantly rein in its programme, and a stockpile of highly enriched uranium is believed to remain buried following US and Israeli airstrikes last June, where it could potentially be recovered and processed to bomb grade. Iran says it wants the US to recognise its right to enrich uranium for peaceful purposes.

Further complicating matters, Iran's supreme leader has issued a directive that the country's near-weapons-grade uranium cannot be sent abroad, according to two senior Iranian officials who spoke to Reuters.

Some analysts have suggested the war could make Iran more, not less, likely to pursue a nuclear weapon to shield itself, as nuclear-armed North Korea has done. Another of Trump's declared goals, forcing Iran to halt support for armed proxy groups, also remains unmet.

What are the broader strategic consequences of the Iran war?

Trump is now dealing with new Iranian leaders considered even more hardline than their slain predecessors, who are widely expected to retain enough missiles and drones to pose a continued threat to their neighbors. Relations with traditional European allies have eroded further, as most refused his calls for assistance in a war they were not consulted about. China and Russia, meanwhile, have drawn lessons about US military shortcomings against asymmetric Iranian tactics and the depletion of some weapons supplies.

Robert Kagan, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, has argued that the outcome will be an even more decisive setback to US standing than its withdrawals from Vietnam and Afghanistan, because those countries "were far from the main theaters of global competition." Writing in a commentary titled "Checkmate in Iran" in The Atlantic, he argued that "there will be no return to the status quo ante, no ultimate American triumph that will undo or overcome the harm done."

Jonathan Panikoff, a former deputy national intelligence officer for the Middle East and now at the Atlantic Council, said Iran's rulers consider it a success simply to have survived the US assault and learned how much control they can exert over Gulf shipping. "What they discovered is they can exercise that leverage and with few consequences for them," he said, adding that Iran appeared confident it could tolerate more economic pain than Trump and outlast him.