Since the collapse of June’s hastily signed Memorandum of Understanding between Iran and the United States, President Donald Trump has responded to the steady reversal of American progress in the Iran War by repeatedly going through a now-familiar cycle of feigned indifference, theatrical threats, and humiliating retreats. Last week, the administration signaled that it was preparing for a significant bombing campaign, only to back off at the last moment—reportedly after the Pentagon warned the president that supplies of critical munitions and already-scarce missile interceptors would be depleted by such an escalation. After a brief lull in the fighting earlier this week succumbed to a fresh round of Iranian ballistic missile attacks on US bases in Jordan, the president promised on Wednesday morning, with his typical lack of decorum, to “beat the fucking shit” out of Iran and then launched a new round of strikes on Thursday. The clear takeaway from all these frantic off-the-cuff bids to reshape the guiding narrative of the conflict is that the Trump administration no longer bothers trying to connect the use of violence to any kind of political goal.

A casual observer could be forgiven for thinking that we are trapped in some kind of eternal recurrence loop, condemned to experience its clear pattern of escalation and retreat “once more and innumerable times more,” as Nietzsche once wrote. But despite the sometimes bleakly amusing nature of the president’s ineptitude, we may now be entering the most dangerous moment of the conflict, with no clear off-ramp for either side. Iran’s leaders believe, with pretty good reason, that they have the upper hand and can now wait for Trump to buckle under the coming waves of economic pain. Iran doesn’t seem to care whether negotiations are restarted at all, given that their American counterparts can’t be trusted to send professional negotiators or follow through on their commitments—and that the United States reveals a fresh strategic vulnerability every time the shooting resumes.

On the Iranian side, the conflict is threatening to engulf more of the region. Tehran has already demonstrated the ability to disrupt operations at the UAE’s Fujairah port facility. This site marks the terminus of an East-West pipeline whose capacity the Emirati regime is seeking to double by next year and whose output has helped keep the global energy crisis from spiraling. But a simple glance at a map demonstrates why continued reliance on Fujairah is not a workable long-term strategy if Iran is committed to establishing its hegemony over regional energy exports. The port sits just outside the Strait of Hormuz on the Gulf of Oman, well within range of Iran’s ultra-cheap drones and stockpile of ballistic missiles.

Meanwhile, the Saudi port of Yanbu, while further from Iran, has a similar set of vulnerabilities. Pipelines are relatively easy to repair, but that’s not the case for the expensive, vulnerable infrastructure at the ports. And because the cost of offensive weapons will always be lower than the cost of missile-defense systems, there is no feasible way to ensure the long-term safety of these facilities as long as the Iranian regime exists in its current incarnation.

Iran’s Houthi allies in Yemen have also joined the war effort by announcing their intent to close the Bab al-Mandab strategic shipping chokepoint, impose passage fees through the waterway and harass shipping in the Red Sea moving to and from the Suez Canal. The Houthis control the vast majority of Yemeni territory and are eager to demonstrate their leverage, which has fundamentally altered Iran’s strategic position in the Strait of Hormuz. Iran’s direct hit on an American base in Jordan on July 17 and 18, which killed three service members, also revealed a significant new weakness for the United States and its regional basing strategy and may have played a role in Trump’s once again backing down from threats.

As if all this isn’t bad enough for the United States, the war, which was meant to last days at most, is now clearly on track to become another regional forever war. The latest round of fighting now threatens to interrupt energy flows that thus far have survived relatively unscathed, and even reach into the Russia-Ukraine conflict in Europe. On Monday, Ukraine struck an Iranian vessel in the Caspian Sea—an incursion that represents the first time the two countries have traded blows directly despite Iran’s supplying Russia with drones and drone technology throughout its barbaric war against Ukraine. The precision of Iranian strikes against American and allied assets in the region suggests that Russia is, in turn, providing advanced targeting data to Tehran.

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After mostly sitting on the sidelines early in the war, Saudi Arabia is now participating directly in combat, as are the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, and Bahrain. The United States and Saudi Arabia are carrying out strikes against Iranian proxies in Iraq, much to the chagrin of the Iraqi government. Iranian drones struck two American ships, including a natural gas tanker, in Egypt on Wednesday, essentially putting the region on notice that it can reach and damage energy infrastructure much further afield than the Strait of Hormuz. This is exactly the spiral of region-wide escalation and retaliation that credible experts warned would be the inevitable outcome of an attempted regime-change operation against Iran.

What might Trump be willing to do to extricate himself from the hole he has dug for himself? For months, he has intermittently and casually threatened to attack Iranian civilian infrastructure like power plants, bridges and even water-desalination plants. His gobsmacking threat to eradicate Iranian civilization was issued fewer than four months ago. So the idea that this is some kind of moral line that Trump would never cross is absurd. After all, the man who talked him into the Iran fiasco in the first place, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, still presides over the wanton and deliberate destruction of Palestinian civilian infrastructure in Gaz—and both he and Trump have shrugged off the resulting humanitarian crisis. If it bothers the president that millions of Palestinians are living in rubble-strewn squalor without electricity or running water, he has never said so in public.

Having effectively signed off on the ongoing atrocities in Gaza, how would Trump be prevented from doing the same to Iran? These prospective war crimes would almost certainly fail to achieve the objectives of either dislodging the Iranian regime or forcing it to reopen Hormuz on America’s terms—but that’s far from any guarantee that a reckless and inattentive figure like Trump wouldn’t try. Yet such attacks would only lead to further Iranian escalation, including assaults on undersea fiber optic cables that have thus far been deemed off limits even by the aggressive new leadership in Tehran.

In the midst of all this feckless mayhem, Iran’s leaders almost can’t believe their dumb luck. Whether it’s the still-unseen Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khomeini pulling the strings or a de facto Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps junta, Tehran’s strategy has quickly evolved from bare regime survival to something more far-reaching. Far from being eager to settle and return to the status quo ante—which included crippling sanctions, the constant threat of Israeli or American assassinations and sabotage, and the distinct possibility of being overthrown in a popular uprising—Tehran now sees a path to a decisive break with its prewar predicament and an end to America’s decades-long policy of “containment” against the Islamic Republic. This new status quo would position Iran as by far the most powerful state in the region, unshackled from the preexisting global sanctions regime and free to pursue both conventional and nuclear capabilities. Any deal that Tehran would agree to today is likely to offer substantially worse terms to the United States than the one Trump signed in June.

America’s ongoing inability to bring Iran to heel only accelerates this dynamic. With Iran’s pivotal control over the Strait of Hormuz firmly established alongside its demonstrated ability to destroy both American bases and energy infrastructure at will, there will be no more unanswered bombing raids of Iranian nuclear facilities, cost-free assassinations of senior IRGC leaders, or open-ended backing of opposition groups. If Iran can credibly threaten the global economy, and the United States either can’t or won’t do what is necessary to neutralize that threat, it’s no longer clear that any element of the prewar containment regime can survive for long.

The only way to prevent this bleak outcome from taking shape, as Trump surely knows by now, is to depose the Iranian regime with a massive ground invasion. But even that dire move may not be possible, given the country’s challenging terrain, capable defenses, and motivated population. Just pacifying Tehran, a sprawling, mountain metropolis of 15 million people—not much smaller than the entire population of Iraq circa 2003—would be a daunting task. A March report from the Cato Institute’s Brendan Buck argued that 1.6 million troops would be required to mount an invasion of Iran—a figure that exceeds the current number of combat troops available to the whole US military. Even if the actual figure is half that, it would require a vast and costly mobilization on a scale not seen since the Vietnam War. Political blowback from that sort of commitment could put a filibuster-proof Senate majority for Democrats in play this November.

It would be easy to glibly dismiss the possibility that Trump will elect to pursue such a disastrous course of action. But he has a lifelong track record of making terrible, immoral choices and a very recent history of happily inhaling the vapors of whatever his most militant interlocutors are smoking. Eventually, he is going to run out of patience with his own bomb-and-bail routine, which is paying zero dividends. At that point, he will confront the same choices he’s had before him for months: return to some version of the bitter peace that he agreed to in June, give aerial war crimes a try, or prepare for the biggest war that nearly anyone currently alive has witnessed. Whatever he chooses, it is likely now far too late for the midterm elections to be anything other than a referendum on the Trump administration’s decision to plunge the country into this hopeless situation.