Michael Baumgartner

WASHINGTON – Rep. Michael Baumgartner has been consistent about his preferred approach to the U.S. war with Iran.

When President Donald Trump agreed June 17 to end a U.S. military blockade of Iranian ships as part of a deal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, a vital waterway for global trade in oil and other goods, the GOP congressman from Spokane said he would have rather had the blockade continue until Iran’s government gave up all of its enriched nuclear material.

After the agreement fell apart and the fighting resumed less than a month later, Baumgartner repeated that argument Monday in a post on X, calling it a “strategy/objective the American people will understand and support.” In an interview Wednesday, he elaborated on that point and called for longer-term strategy in the war.

“My strategy,” Baumgartner said, is based on the idea that “the Strait of Hormuz should not be a strength for Iran. It should be a weakness, because their energy supplies are on one side of the strait and the U.S. Navy is well equipped to keep Iranian ships from leaving.”

The blockade is a far better strategy, he said, than deploying U.S. troops to seize Kharg Island, a key oil depot off Iran’s coast. Trump declined to rule out that possibility in an interview with Fox News on Tuesday, but Baumgartner said the energy resources such an invasion would aim to seize are only valuable if they can be shipped overseas and sold.

After the United States and Israel launched joint strikes on Iran at the end of February, the weakened Iranian military still managed to shut down shipping traffic through the strait, trapping ships in the Persian Gulf. The resulting disruption to the global supply of oil, gas, fertilizer, aluminum, plastic and more has sent economic shockwaves around the world.

Even in the United States, where consumers are relatively insulated from those price shocks, rising prices of gas and other goods have made the war’s impact felt. That gives Iran a potent geopolitical tool, but Baumgartner said the ability to close the strait will become less impactful as other countries in the Middle East expand pipelines to carry oil and gas to other ports, bypassing the Persian Gulf.

The war’s impact on Iran’s neighbors and the broader region was highlighted by the visit of new Iraqi Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi, who met with Baumgartner and other members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee at the Capitol on Wednesday after meeting with Trump at the White House a day earlier.

“The Strait of Hormuz is going to be a diminishing point of leverage for the Iranians, and can in fact be a point of strategic leverage for us,” the congressman said.

In the meantime, Baumgartner said the Trump administration should communicate its goals more clearly to the U.S. public. If the renewed blockade causes gas prices to rise, he said, Americans should understand that’s a small price to pay for achieving what he called the “tier-one national security threat” of Iran obtaining nuclear weapons.

That would require a different approach than the Trump administration has taken so far. After initially saying the war would last barely a month, Trump has repeatedly signaled that he wants it to end soon. With November’s midterm election approaching, Democrats hope the unpopular war will help them take control of at least one chamber of Congress, as voters who gravitated toward Trump’s campaign promise to end the United States’ “forever wars” are driven away from the Republican Party.

“I cannot support continuing to fund a war without a goal, without the support of the American people and without our allies, period,” Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., said in a brief interview Wednesday. She called the conflict with Iran “an endless war” and comparing it to previous U.S. military involvement in Vietnam and Afghanistan.

Ryan Crocker, a Spokane Valley resident who served as U.S. ambassador to Iraq and five other countries during a Foreign Service career that began in Iran, said that whether or not Americans realize it, the United States has effectively been at war with Iran for decades. As a young diplomat in 1983, Crocker narrowly survived the bombing of the U.S. embassy in Lebanon by an Iran-backed militia, which followed Iran’s capture of American hostages amid the 1979 revolution that brought the current regime to power in Tehran.

“It’s continued ever since, at varying pitches,” Crocker said in an interview Wednesday, referring to the U.S.-Iran conflict. “We tend to ignore it most of the time. The Iranians don’t.”

Crocker, who worked with Baumgartner in Iraq and has sometimes disagreed with the freshman congressman’s positions on foreign policy matters, said he agrees that the U.S. government needs to commit to “an enduring campaign” with “no expectation of a quick victory” if it wants to change the strategic reality behind the conflict.

“The signal we’ve got to send is that we’re in a war, and we’re going to stick with it until the situation changes,” Crocker said, adding that the U.S. government also needs to reassure its allies in the Gulf, who he said are “skittish as hell, with good reason” after being repeatedly targeted by Iranian drone and missile strikes while Trump administration officials vacillate in their approach to the war.

“They don’t know what Trump’s going to say next or do next,” Crocker said. “But we need to do what this administration is so loath to do, which is say, ‘Look, it’s going to be a long slog. We’re in it for the long haul. One thing we will not permit is Iranian control of the Strait.’ Full stop.”

The new wave of Iranian leaders who have taken over since U.S. and Israeli strikes killed many of their predecessors, Crocker said, are mostly veterans of the Iran-Iraq War, “forged” in the brutal conflict between the neighboring countries that lasted from 1980 to 1988.

“They’re all back, and if there’s one thing they know how to do, it’s war and endure,” Crocker said of the new Iranian leaders. “So the notion that somehow we can bomb them into surrender or submission is just farcical.”

By signaling that he wants to end the war quickly, Crocker said, Trump is encouraging Iran’s leaders and effectively telling them, “Just stick it out. The Americans will get tired and go home.”

“The worst thing we can do is to exhibit that kind of short-term view, expectation of a quick victory,” he said. “The Iranians have known from the beginning they were not going to suffer that sort of defeat. It’s a consistent part of American foreign policy, and it’s our greatest vulnerability.”

There are diplomatic ways out of the conflict, Crocker said, but they require keeping pressure on Iran’s government until “the economic damage is so severe that they’ve got to recalculate.”

“The challenge for us is can we find a way to put ourselves on a minimalist war footing that is acceptable, bearable, sustainable to the American people, both politically and economically,” he said. “And at the same time, provide enough of a sense of resolve and power that our enemies may recalculate their strategic logic.”