This story appeared in Today, Explained, a daily newsletter that helps you understand the most compelling news and stories of the day. Subscribe here.

It’s been just over eight weeks since the US and Israel started a war with Iran for contradictory and incoherent reasons. Virtually nothing about the conflict — except maybe its stakes — has gotten clearer since then, and there’s still no end in sight: US-Iran talks, set to take place in Pakistan over the weekend, fell apart on Saturday. In a social media post, President Donald Trump said of Iran that “Nobody knows who is in charge, including them. Also, we have all the cards, they have none!”

I figured some of you might have questions, so Vox’s senior foreign policy correspondent, Joshua Keating, is stopping by to field a few reader-submitted questions about the Iran conflict.

Here’s what you wanted to know, and what Josh had to say:

I continue to hear people on the right defend the decision to attack Iran as a necessary measure to prevent the regime from obtaining a nuclear weapon. Is there any truth to that?

Iran has a stockpile of around 400 kilograms of highly enriched uranium, which in theory could provide enough material to make 10–11 nuclear weapons. Iran had denied that it wanted to build a bomb, and the last Ayatollah Ali Khamenei famously issued a fatwa against nuclear weapons, but there’s no credible civilian use for the level of enrichment it carried out. 

At the same time, it’s also possible that rather than building a bomb, Iran believed that staying as a “threshold” nuclear state gave it leverage in negotiations with the West and a form of deterrence. This proved to be a serious miscalculation. 

As far as we know, Iran still has this material — the “nuclear dust” Trump keeps talking about — buried underground at one or more of its main enrichment sites. Whether the Iranians could actually excavate the material and make it into a usable weapon before this activity was detected and attacked by the US or Israel is an open question. But having now been bombed in the midst of nuclear negotiations twice in the past year, Iran probably has even more incentive to build a nuke than it did before.  

How likely is it that the Strait of Hormuz remains closed/mostly closed indefinitely?

Depends what you mean by “closed” and by “indefinitely.” Trump’s extension of the ceasefire last week might suggest he has little interest in launching military action to open the strait, or just that he’s waiting for more military assets to arrive in the region. 

Either way, both sides clearly have an economic incentive to reopen the strait — though Iran may have a greater incentive to inflict enough of a disruption on its adversaries that they won’t consider attacking again in a few months. Experts believe Iran has planned for months of economic pressure and is calculating that the US has a lower pain tolerance. 

It’s equally hard to imagine a world in which other countries, particularly Iran’s neighbors across the Gulf, tolerate it continuing to charge tolls for use of an international waterway. But we’re in unprecedented territory here. It’s hard to say anything for certain. 

Aren’t there any options for bypassing the Strait of Hormuz? Why can’t Saudi Arabia or someone come up with a solution?

In fact there is. The East-West pipeline, built in the 1980s during the Iran-Iraq War with exactly this kind of scenario in mind, runs from Saudi Arabia’s eastern oil fields to the port of Yanbu on its western Red Sea coast. It has quickly become arguably the most important piece of energy infrastructure on the planet and was targeted several times by Iranian missiles and drones.  

The pipeline is now operating at its full capacity of 7 million barrels a day, which has been an important relief valve for the global economy, but isn’t enough to replace the 20 million barrels that normally flow through Hormuz. 

Gulf countries are now considering a number of other pipeline projects, but probably not on a timeframe that will do much to help with this crisis. 

Ultimately, Hormuz isn’t like other “chokepoints” in the global economy. The geography of the region’s oil fields and the Persian Gulf means there’s really not an alternative to the Strait of Hormuz. 

I understand that the war in Iran has depleted America’s stockpiles of key ammunition. How long will it take to rebuild those stockpiles, and how much of a problem is that? (Put differently: Don’t we plan for stockpiles to be used and rebuilt?)

It’s a serious problem. The New York Times reported last week that the US has used more than 1,000 Tomahawk missiles in this war, and it produces only about 100 per year. We’ve burned through about 50 percent of our THAAD missile interceptors — around 200 — and we only buy about 11 per year. This has led to diversions of these very in-demand systems from Europe and East Asia. 

This would not be a great moment for the US to get into another major war, particularly with a peer adversary like China. But how serious a problem it is depends on how much longer this war lasts and how many targets the US still wants to hit. It is, certainly, a good time to be in the missile business. The Pentagon wants to invest another $30 billion into critical munitions, including interceptors. 

I’m concerned about how Iran might retaliate against the US by means of cyberwarfare. Is there any evidence that their ability to do so has been affected by the US/Israel attacks?

Iran doesn’t appear able to launch the kind of major cyberattacks that would seriously disrupt Americans’ daily lives, but attacks by pro-Iranian “hacktivist” groups have been increasing, with targets including the medical device maker Stryker, the social network Bluesky, and the Los Angeles Metro. These attacks are a concern, but not on the level of the kind of damage that is feared from ongoing Chinese hacking campaigns like Volt Typhoon and Salt Typhoon. 

American and Iranian negotiators are reportedly getting closer to a deal that would end the weeks-long war between the nations, following the collapse of in-person talks in Islamabad last weekend. In his announcement Sunday, Vice President JD Vance initially sounded pretty hopeless about the whole thing, as you might expect of a man whose dreams had just been smashed. But now there are reports of backchannel phone calls, Pakistani delegations, frameworks of frameworks…it’s all very The Diplomat. 

Incidentally, my colleagues at the Today, Explained podcast just scored a fascinating interview with an actual diplomat: Wendy Sherman, the former deputy secretary of state and President Barack Obama’s top negotiator for the 2015 Iran nuclear deal. So this morning, we’re turning to Sherman to (try to) understand the Trump administration’s screwups in Iran in 2026.

In her new interview with Vox’s Noel King, Sherman cautioned against being too “reductive” in discussing the outcomes of the war or the talks. (Iran has absolutely been weakened, she said.) But she outlined five areas where the Trump administration’s approach has, so far, failed. 

Problem No. 1: They sent the B team to negotiate

Nearly 300 Americans descended on Islamabad for the most recent round of US-Iranian negotiations, including national security advisers, regional specialists, and Vice President JD Vance, who led the US delegation. But earlier rounds of negotiations were helmed by guys like Jared Kushner (Donald Trump’s son-in-law) and Steve Witkoff (Trump’s personal friend). Whatever their merits, neither man holds any particular expertise on Iran (or a real government position). 

To further complicate matters, the US attacked Iran twice during previous rounds of ceasefire negotiations that Kushner and Witkoff hosted. So they don’t exactly radiate credibility, Sherman said. 

Problem No. 2: They pursued a strategy that benefited Russia

Whatever the outcome of these peace talks, no one makes out better than Russian President Vladimir Putin. While the war in Iran is costing the US something like $2 billion a day, it could generate as much as $151 billion in additional revenue this year for the Russian government.

Russia benefits both from rising oil prices and from the relaxation of long-standing US sanctions, which Trump partially lifted in March. That windfall has already eased a domestic economic crisis in Russia and allowed Putin to continue his Ukraine war. 

But that’s not the only way that Russia — and other US adversaries, including China — benefit from the war in Iran. The US will also emerge from the conflict weaker than it began, Sherman said: “We have just spent billions of dollars. We have reduced our inventory of weapons that we may need for other theaters. We have undermined our alliances.”

Problem No. 3: They badly damaged the world economy

At this point, I probably don’t need to list the myriad and diverse ways that the war — and the subsequent closure of the Strait of Hormuz — has destabilized the global economy. Just this Tuesday, Britain’s finance minister slammed Trump for what she called a costly “mistake” and “folly.”  

Whatever you make of that “folly” bit, however, the cost was predictable, Sherman said. In fact, it came up repeatedly during the 2015 nuclear negotiations.  

“We constantly said to the United States Congress, ‘if we risk war, it could close the Strait of Hormuz; it could increase the gas prices; it could take down the international economy,’” she added.

Problem No. 4: They did not, in fact, have the Iranians’ “backs”

President Trump initially urged Iranians to rise up against the regime, promising that the US would support them. Now, regime change is no longer a focus of either the US military campaign or negotiations to end it. That’s a major blow to many pro-democracy activists in Iran and throughout the Iranian diaspora, as the writer and advocate Roya Rastegar wrote for Vox last month. 

“Iranian citizens who do want freedom…have been completely forgotten in this process,” Sherman said. “The regime in place in Iran now is more hardline than the one before, if you can believe it.”

Problem No. 5: They actually made the nuclear problem worse

As my colleague Joshua Keating has written, Trump’s quest to stop Iran from getting a nuke could actually encourage the regime to seek out a bomb. Why? Because in the present world (dis)order, that actually looks like the best or only way to protect against US intervention. 

Meanwhile, if Iran gets a bomb, other countries will want one too — including close US allies, Sherman said. So the world may ultimately become more likely to see a nuclear attack because of Trump’s war.

The bottom line? “The United States, in my view, has been set back.”

Listen to the full interview with Wendy Sherman here.

Editor’s note, April 7, 7:30 pm ET: President Donald Trump announced on Tuesday evening that the US and Iran had agreed to a two-week ceasefire to negotiate a more comprehensive agreement to end the war. This news came before Trump’s deadline of 8 pm ET for Iran to reach a deal or, he said, a “whole civilization will die tonight.” The article below was originally published earlier Tuesday and explains how we reached this point.

We’re now more than five weeks into President Donald Trump’s unpopular and apparently unprovoked war with Iran, and any decisive “victory” still seems far off. The US and Israel have dominated the battlefield from the start. But Iran successfully brought an economic crisis to a gunfight: By closing the Strait of Hormuz, a major chokepoint in the global energy trade, it spiked the price of oil, fertilizer, and other goods and triggered rationing and curfews in dozens of countries. A gallon of gas now tops $4, on average, in the United States. 

Trump has veered from one approach to another as he struggles to resolve this thorny situation. First he tried suggesting that the closure of the Strait was not actually a problem at all. When that failed, he said other countries would handle it. On Sunday morning, he took a very, er, different tack: “Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell,” he posted on Truth Social, where he threatened to bomb Iran’s power plants and bridges. 

The thing about Trump’s threats is that he often doesn’t follow through on them. Online commentators have even coined an acronym for this: TACO, or “Trump always chickens out.” Should Trump not chicken out, however, then the US could be bombing 93 million civilians “back to the Stone Ages” in a matter of hours. 

But let’s back up. Why is the US in Iran to begin with?

The US and Israel launched surprise airstrikes against Iran on February 28. Trump has variably claimed those strikes were intended to eliminate an “imminent threat,” to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon, and/or to oust the repressive, theocratic regime that has ruled the country for generations. 

You might generously assume that, in pursuing multiple and occasionally conflicting objectives, Trump is taking something of a many-birds-with-one-stone approach. But as NPR’s Mara Liasson put it Monday, it certainly looks like he’s making the strategy up “as he goes.”

The Iranians, on the other hand, have been very strategic. Using a vast supply of small, cheap drones, the regime has brought the (asymmetric) fight to the US and Israel, forcing both countries to drain their supply of expensive interceptor missiles.

They also weaponized the country’s geography by blockading the Strait of Hormuz, a waterway that many — dare I say most? — Americans could not name or place before last month. Reopening the Strait is now a central objective of the military action, and the Trump administration seems to understand that the war will be perceived as a loss for the US unless/until it reopens.

What will persuade Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz?

That’s the $200 billion question. At times, Trump has seemed determined to make the problem go away by insisting it doesn’t exist. Just last week, he claimed that the Strait would “open up naturally” after the conflict ended and said other countries that rely on Gulf oil should take on the task of getting tankers through again. 

At other times, Trump has taken a starkly different approach — threatening to dramatically and aggressively escalate strikes if Iran didn’t reopen the Strait. On each occasion, however, he’s given the Iranian regime a deadline…and then delayed. And delayed.

On March 21, he threatened to “obliterate” Iranian power plants if the Strait was not opened within 48 hours. He then extended that timeline until March 26 to allow for negotiations. 

On March 26, Trump again extended the deadline, this time until the evening of April 6. On April 5, he bumped it to 8 pm Eastern today, April 7. He also threw in a couple of well-placed profanities to signal he meant business. (Update: He agreed to a two-week cease-fire before the deadline.)

How serious are Trump’s threats?

If you mean “serious” as in “sincere” or “likely,” we have no earthly clue. And reasonable people can probably disagree on whether swearing makes you sound like a more or less serious person. 

But in terms of how significant or worrying these threats are, the answer is: incredibly. International law permits military strikes on power plants and similar infrastructure only if they contribute to military operations. Widespread strikes on civilian targets are likely “illegal and unacceptable,” as one high-ranking European Union official put it. 

US and Israeli strikes have already killed 1,500 civilians and badly damaged infrastructure in Iran, including highway bridges, energy and industrial sites, residential neighborhoods, and school campuses. These new threats would go considerably further, potentially disrupting electricity, health care, clean water, and other critical services for millions of Iranians.

Both the US and Iran have rejected ceasefire proposals that would have paused fighting for 45 days and established a path for reopening the Strait. In the absence of that kind of negotiated off-ramp, we have a surreal, uncertain countdown…and Trump’s Truth Social feed.

This story first appeared in Today, Explained, a daily newsletter that helps you understand the most compelling news and stories of the day. Subscribe here.