Opinion | Stop Looking for an ‘Offramp’ in Iran. There’s No Such Thing.

The war with Iran had barely been joined when the search for an offramp began.

“Exclusive: Trump Floats ‘Offramps’ After Attacking Iran,” Axios reported on Feb. 28, the same day that the United States and Israel started bombing targets. “It’s Too Soon for Iran ‘Offramps,’” the Wall Street Journal editorial board countered the next day, suggesting that Iran’s military capabilities needed to be destroyed before the Trump administration looked for an exit sign.

Other news outlets soon adopted the metaphor. “As the Iran War Continues, What Are the Potential Offramps for Trump?” NPR asked. BBC News reported that “Trump’s Iran Strategy Is to Pursue Two Offramps at Once,” a driving strategy I would not recommend. The Times described the eventual cease-fire agreement in early April as “an 11th-hour offramp,” and PBS’s “Washington Week With The Atlantic” convened last week to discuss “Trump’s Struggle to Find an Offramp From the Iran War.”

It is a seductive image. An offramp implies a safe and easy exit from a highway, an especially appealing option if it turns out the highway isn’t taking you where you’d originally hoped. Too many traffic jams, accidents or potholes in this “little excursion,” as President Trump called the conflict with Iran? Just take the offramp back to normality — and leave the war behind.

Even the administration uses the term. “Iran is looking for an offramp following your powerful threat,” Steve Witkoff, a U.S. special envoy to the Middle East, said to Trump in a March cabinet meeting, referring to the president’s warning that he would “obliterate” the country’s power plants if Iran’s leaders did not reopen the Strait of Hormuz. (They didn’t comply, and he didn’t follow through.) And David Sacks, a venture capitalist and influential White House technology adviser, has argued that Trump should just claim victory and “get out” of the conflict. “We should try to find the offramp,” Sacks said.

Except an offramp from war rarely returns you to the roads you once drove or the world you once knew. The United States will find no offramp to a prewar status quo. The conflict has changed the maps, and all roads now lead somewhere new.

The war has revealed the Iranian regime to be far more resilient and capable than American authorities, enamored with the speed of the operation against Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro, had expected. Iran may emerge not just emboldened by standing tall against a superpower but also empowered with new leverage over a global economy as vulnerable as ever to fragile supply chains and vital choke points. The war has depleted the American weapons arsenal, rendering us less ready to respond to potential crises elsewhere; it has also shown how cheap drone technology is changing the nature — and raising the costs — of modern warfare.

The conflict has also delivered an economic windfall to President Vladimir Putin of Russia, increasing the country’s oil revenue and loosening sanctions. It has strengthened the hand of China — expanding its influence in regional energy markets, enhancing its global sway and perhaps whetting its appetite for an excursion of its own in, say, Taiwan. Two decades ago, the United States lectured China on the need to become a “responsible stakeholder” in the international system. Now, as Trump and President Xi Jinping meet in Beijing, which country has the more credible claim to that role?

By weakening the already feeble ties between Washington and its traditional allies, the war has undercut any remaining American pretensions to global leadership. Trump is abandoning NATO, de facto if not de jure, and the “rupture” to the global order that Prime Minister Mark Carney of Canada warned about this year is now evident to all.

We are now in the third month of a war that Trump pledged would last only a few weeks, a fight that he often bragged was “ahead of schedule.” Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel signaled in recent interviews that the battle is hardly over, and Iran’s maximal demands — reparations from Washington, sovereignty over the Strait of Hormuz, an end to sanctions — show how far-off any offramp really is.

Just ask Vice President JD Vance, reportedly an early skeptic of war with Iran, who was recently reduced to calling the conflict “a little blip” during a speech in Iowa. Pretending the war doesn’t matter much may be the most foolish version of an offramp; Trump, too, has dismissed the conflict as a “miniwar.”

American leaders have long fantasized about offramps from war, even if they have used different terms. Richard Nixon promised “peace with honor” as a path out of Vietnam; Barack Obama pledged a “responsible transition” of U.S. forces out of Afghanistan. The Clinton administration listed an “exit strategy” as an essential component of planning for any military deployments in its National Security Strategy of 1994. “Do we have timelines and milestones that will reveal the extent of success or failure, and, in either case, do we have an exit strategy?” it asked.

In a 1998 Foreign Affairs essay, Gideon Rose decried the “delusion” of the exit strategy. “The idea of an exit strategy contributes to a false notion that military interventions are mechanical tasks like building a new kitchen,” he wrote, “rather than strategic contests marked by friction and uncertainty.” The fixation on the exit strategy can signal a lack of resolve to the enemy; if America’s leadership is focused on getting out, our opponents can dig in their heels, as Iran is doing, and just wait us out.

The exit-strategy imperative also makes the departure of U.S. forces an objective — rather than a consequence — of a successful military operation, thus mixing ends and means. “The key question is not how we get out,” Rose argued, “but why we are getting in.” And that is a question that the Trump administration, with so many competing explanations and justifications, has not clearly answered in Iran.

An offramp is an even weaker version of an exit strategy. At least the exit strategy carries the pretense of strategic consideration, of a goal that is articulated and weighed alongside others. But when you just want to get off the highway as soon as possible, any ramp will do. It is as unsurprising as it is appalling that, according to Reuters, the administration has asked its intelligence agencies to assess how Iran would react if Trump simply declared victory and moved on from a war he reportedly finds boring.

Trump promised no more forever wars; Iran could be his whatever war.

Any offramp looks distant today. The president has called Iran’s latest list of demands a “piece of garbage,” derided the Iranian leaders as “stupid people” and declared the cease-fire struck in early April to be on “life support.” Next month it will be one year since Trump affirmed that Iran’s nuclear program had been obliterated by Operation Midnight Hammer, yet he remains stuck in neutral in a war that has accomplished virtually none of his stated objectives and that risks leaving Iran in a stronger geopolitical position and less damaged militarily than the administration has claimed.

Even some face-saving agreement — one that allows Trump to say he won and to assure Americans that his deal is better than the one the Obama administration negotiated and Trump ripped up during his first term — will not undo the damage the conflict has caused or the weakness it has revealed.

In war, offramps are rarely well marked or well paved.