What’s Next In Trump’s War With Iran? How The War Ends. Friday’s Edition.
The Long Chain: America and Iran. Series 35 #3
By July 20, 2026, the war had killed 18 American service members and wounded more than 430. Three of the 18 died in the previous four days, two of them in an Iranian missile strike on an air base in Jordan. Iran’s Ministry of Health counted 3,468 dead in the war’s first forty days, among them 376 children. The day before, Iran’s Revolutionary Guard had banned all shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, and Brent crude closed at 89 dollars a barrel, up about 13 dollars since the truce collapsed. Trump said America was “winning big” in Iran. The war was in its fifth month.
Monday’s Edition and Wednesday’s Edition traced how the 1953 coup and more than forty years of undeclared fighting produced this war. Friday’s Edition covers the war, a prediction partly wrong, and what happens next. The answer comes from the two cultural perspectives more than from the two nations’ arsenals.
The open war began over the bomb. Iran had enriched uranium to 60 percent, below the 90 percent a weapon needs. Israel unilaterally and wrongly called that close enough to a weapon and attacked Iran on June 13, 2025. Trump joined the attack on June 21, bombing the nuclear sites at Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan. Twelve days of strikes ended in a ceasefire; the nuclear program and Iran’s government both survived. America learned (again) that bombing alone does not bring down a government, so Trump kept the sanctions in place. Iran learned its defenses could not stop an American attack, so it rebuilt the bombed sites.
