That’s the current state of play according to Wilbur Ross, Trump’s former commerce secretary in his first administration. Speaking exclusively to Fortune, Ross said the president has a balance of risks to strike: Either face the wrath of voters if oil prices remain high due to the Iran conflict, or withdraw from the region and risk that being used against him.
Of course, there will be other forces shaping voters’ perceptions in the run-up to the midterms—Ross highlights immigration issues as chief among them—but there is no denying that “affordability” has become a political lightning rod, and was the issue that Trump made key promises on during his election run.
Ross underlined that, in the grand scheme of wars, the Iran conflict is thus-far relatively short-lived. However, it has dragged on in the eyes of Wall Street and voters, given that Trump’s rhetoric at the outset was that it would be over within a matter of weeks.
“We’re about to go into the midterm elections, and so there’s an unusual political factor which I’m sure both sides are aware of. The Iranians seem to be betting that they can outlast the president, and that has been a characteristic theory of their prior discussions,” Ross explained. “The war itself, in a kind of technical sense, is over. Iran has no air force, they have no real navy, they have no air defense, so in that sense, it’s over. The question is, can we win the peace? And that’s what Hormuz is about.”
