Three-quarters of Americans want Donald Trump’s war with Iran to end without further resumption of hostilities on either side — and almost as many say the war wasn’t worth it in the first place.
A new CBS poll released Sunday found that the president’s foreign policy choices are deeply underwater with voters as peace talks are supposedly set to continue and the administration oversees the rollout of a new ceasefire extension signed by U.S. and Iranian officials on Wednesday.
In the poll, 78 percent of U.S. adults say that they want the war to be over, a clear refutation of the Trump administration’s insistence that Americans would be willing to weather economic pain and frustration in exchange for removing the supposed threat of Iran’s nuclear weapons. With Trump securing essentially the same commitment to abstain from developing nuclear weapons from Iran that the Obama administration secured in 2015, 69 percent of Americans say the cost of the war was not worth entering the conflict in the first place.
The findings come as a shaky ceasefire seems to be slipping away from the White House in real time. A renewed Israeli assault into Lebanon has inflamed tensions across the region, with Hezbollah militants fighting back against the invading forces and Iranian officials responding with announcements of another closure of the Strait of Hormuz, only days after it reopened.
Early Sunday morning, President Trump told Fox News that he’d issued a threat directly to Iran’s leadership, telling officials that he’d invade and occupy the entire country if the Strait of Hormuz was not reopened under the terms of the U.S.-Iran ceasefire agreement. Iran argues that Israel is similarly bound by the terms of the deal, and has demanded that the offensive be halted for the ceasefire to continue.
Fox’s Trey Yingst reported Sunday that in an early morning phone call, the U.S. president said he’d warned Iranian officials directly that “you close [the Strait of Hormuz] and you won’t have a country.”
“You won’t even make it back to your f**king country,” Yingst said the president claimed to have relayed to the Iranians, adding: “We’ll take over the rest of the country.”
The Trump White House wasn’t thought to be seriously considering a full-scale invasion of Iran, which American forces have avoided doing since hostilities began in February and would be a clearly unpopular move among the U.S. electorate. The news of the ceasefire caused oil and gasoline prices to sharply drop over the past week, but renewed fighting would likely have the opposite effect.
U.S. officials were known to be considering an invasion of Kharg Island, an offshore oil facility and hub for the Iranian energy sector, before the ceasefire deal was struck last weekend.
Vice President JD Vance was in Switzerland Sunday for the latest round of U.S.-Iran talks, though it was unclear if those talks would continue amid the president’s threats.
In the CBS poll, nearly six in 10 Americans said that the conflict with Iran had caused more problems than it had solved. Polls before the war began indicated that Americans largely did not agree with the administration’s joint assessment with the government of Israel that Iran posed an imminent threat due to the alleged resumption of nuclear weapons development.
Since the war began, the White House and broader administration have been largely unable to explain why it did not seem to account for the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, or at a minimum, was unable to do anything about it.
The White House spent weeks trying to rally an international naval coalition to force open the waterway, where about 20 percent of global oil traffic typically flows. That effort ended in failure, and the U.S. Navy eventually began escorting a reduced number of ships through the strait.
Thirteen U.S. service members have died since the war began, including seven killed by Iranian strikes on facilities around the Middle East and six others killed when a refueling aircraft crashed in Iraq.
Gas prices remain significantly elevated over pre-war levels, though those rates have fallen amid the ceasefire deal.
Republicans in the House and Senate are particularly wary of the ceasefire agreement as they will bear the immediate brunt of the political fallout. The GOP is protecting twin majorities in Congress in this November’s midterm elections, and Democrats are thought to have potential electoral paths to taking the lead in both chambers.
Some Republicans have cheered news of the ceasefire being extended, while others are demanding that the administration obtain further concessions from Iran before backing away from threats to continue the conflict or a military blockade of the strait.
The CBS poll was conducted between June 17 to 19, during which the terms of the agreement were still becoming clear. The margin of error was 2.4 percentage points.
