What do Americans think after five months of war against Iran?

According to a poll conducted in recent days by Reuters/Ipsos, only one in three Americans now supports the war against Iran. Five months have passed since the start of Operation Epic Fury on 28 February, and the latest poll shows the lowest approval rating for the conflict to date. According to Reuters, “69 per cent of Americans, including four in ten Republicans, believe that Donald Trump has not clearly explained the objectives of US military intervention in Iran”. The economic costs of the war have put the Party under pressure, oil prices are rising again, and the Republicans have on more than one occasion warned of the electoral implications ahead of the mid-term elections in November. Until a few days ago, Trump had stated that the mid-term elections would not influence the course of the fighting and attacks in Iran; then, at the start of the week, something changed: the US president expressed confidence in “a new round of diplomatic negotiations” and suspended the attacks, which had been ongoing for ten days without interruption.

Trump also had to respond to analyses regarding the shortage of weapons in the US arsenal. “We have far more ammunition than anyone else in the world, and far more than we need,” he told the Wall Street Journal on Monday following a New York Times article claiming that the president had been advised to shelve plans for an escalation of the conflict because it would further deplete US weapons stocks. According to an analysis published yesterday by the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, the air defence campaign against Iranian attacks has been a “considerable success”, but has required extensive use of interceptors, with Patriot stocks now below 1,000 and THAAD stocks at around 250. According to CSIS estimates, over 1,000 Tomahawk missiles were launched during the war, and stocks may not return to pre-war levels before 2031: “The Trump administration’s request for $95 billion in the defence budget for the 2027 financial year and $21 billion in the war budget supplement reflects this urgency.”