President Trump said before departing for North Dakota that Iran negotiations are moving along well, that the stock market is setting records, and that oil has dropped to sixty-eight dollars a barrel, lower than when he took office. Behind the scenes, Axios reported that Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner are attempting to sweeten the pot for the Iranians by emphasizing that compliance with American demands and the resulting sanctions relief would be a hundred times more valuable financially than using gangster tactics to toll the Strait of Hormuz. The message, reportedly, is think bigger.
Rich Lowry, editor of National Review and author of The Case for Nationalism: How It Made Us Powerful, United, and Free, joined Dan Proft on Chicago’s Morning Answer to assess whether the Iranians are likely to be persuaded by that pitch and what the midterm landscape actually looks like.
Lowry said the Iran situation is exactly what it appears to be, which is a stasis that both sides may be content to maintain indefinitely. He said the only way to fundamentally change the dynamic would be to reopen the Strait of Hormuz through force of arms, and that is not going to happen for three reasons. First, it is a major military operation that carries significant risk. Second, the Gulf states, importantly Saudi Arabia, do not want it. They have had enough. Third, Trump does not want to undertake another major bombing campaign because the first one was not popular, another six weeks of bombing would not end the regime, and the United States is running low on the precision munitions necessary to sustain it.
He said the result is an ongoing negotiation that the administration will perpetually describe as going very well while the Iranians slow-walk every commitment. He noted that the current negotiations are not even about the nuclear file. They are still arguing about what the Iranians supposedly already agreed to in the original sixty-day memorandum, specifically whether Iran controls the strait and whether free shipping is actually guaranteed. He said the Iranians believe the agreement implies they control the waterway, and while the text does not explicitly say that, it kind of implies it. The practical reality is that Iran is right there and can drone any ship at any time very easily, while the United States is very far away and wants to be done with this.
He said the Iranians are counting on several things working in their favor: Democrats taking the House and burying Trump in investigations next year, some other international crisis emerging to distract American attention, and the simple passage of time, since after this November Trump will have less than two years remaining and Iran simply needs to survive until a successor who presumably will not bomb them takes office. He said the enduring achievement of the military campaign is the physical destruction inflicted on Iranian military and industrial infrastructure, which he would not categorize negatively even if it takes six to eight years to reconstitute. Bringing the conflict to a satisfactory diplomatic conclusion, however, was beyond American will or power.
On the proposed Republican National Committee midterm convention in Dallas on September 9th and 10th, Lowry said it is a good idea. If you can get media attention on your message for a few hours in prime time, the attempt is worth making, and the economic record under the big beautiful bill provides genuine material to work with. He said the economy is in really good shape and would be absolutely cooking without the tariffs and the war. But he warned that the overall midterm environment favors Democrats despite the party’s image being in the toilet and arguably worsening further with the nomination of extreme candidates.
Lowry said his baseline expectation is that Republicans will lose the House. He cited Trump’s approval rating around forty percent as the fundamental driver, noting that midterms are ultimately referendums on the president. Republicans have a narrow margin, needing to hold losses to single digits after redistricting gives them perhaps a six-seat cushion, and he does not think they can do it. He said Hakeem Jeffries will likely be the next Speaker. On the Senate, he said Democrats face a heavier lift, needing to win two or three of four red-state races including Texas, Ohio, and Alaska, which he considers a difficult but not impossible task. He noted that Democrats have already hurt themselves with poor candidate selection, with Susan Collins likely to hold on in Maine and the nomination of an anti-Israel DSA-aligned candidate in Michigan potentially putting that seat in play for a Republican pickup that could put the Senate out of reach for Democrats entirely.
On Tucker Carlson’s interview with the Columbia Journalism Review in which he said he intends to build a third party focused on the economic concerns of middle-class Americans rather than foreign policy issues like Hamas, Lowry called it an idiotic project on all levels. He said talking about building a party and actually doing it are entirely different things, that even a one or two percent showing in a general election would function like the Green Party and elect the Democrat that Carlson ostensibly opposes, and that the person most damaged would presumably be JD Vance, whom Carlson likes and who is the likely 2028 Republican nominee. He said the comparison to Nigel Farage’s success in the UK does not translate because Farage succeeded in part because the British Conservative Party ignored the populist right’s core issues for decades, whereas the Republican Party under Trump has made those issues its dominant tendency. There is no comparable vacuum in American politics for a Carlson third party to fill.