The U.S. and Israel crippled Iranian forces in two weeks of war, but Tehran’s ability to disrupt oil flows and its uranium stockpile complicate the push to end it.

After two weeks of war against Iran, President Donald Trump may soon be ready to declare victory. But he confronts a challenge: Tehran also gets a vote.

With most of Iran’s navy eliminated, much of its missile stockpile destroyed and top leaders killed, Trump is nearing the goals his military leaders set at the outset of the war.

But two weeks of conflict have not achieved the broader aims Trump has sometimes declared. A hardened regime in Tehran remains in power, and it is roiling global oil markets by choking off the vital shipping lane that allows oil and gas out of the Persian Gulf.

The country’s leaders may be more eager than ever to race toward a nuclear weapon, diplomats and analysts say. Iran retains control of what the United States and allied nations believe is 440 kilograms of highly enriched uranium, giving it another chip as the regime battles to defend itself and endure the U.S. and Israeli onslaught.

The paradox poses a challenge to Trump’s ability to end the war as he faces increasing pressure from his own party to refocus attention on the economy ahead of the midterm elections.

Gasoline prices have spiked 25 percent since the United States and Israel began bombarding Iran, farmers are facing rising fertilizer costs, and the death toll of U.S. troops is rising. Tehran has proved resilient in its ability to attack ships that try to brave the Strait of Hormuz, making it unclear whether a unilateral halt to the war by the U.S. side would be enough to ease energy prices.

Iranian bombardment has also posed huge challenges to Persian Gulf nations that have traditionally been U.S. allies and host American military bases.

Trump continues to assert that he, alone, controls the pace of the fighting.

The war will end “when I feel it, feel it in my bones,” Trump told Fox News Radio on Friday, saying that he didn’t think it “would be long.”

He added: “We’re way ahead of schedule. Way ahead.”

There is a broad gap, however, between what has been achievable on the battlefield and Washington’s ability to control Iran as a regional threat, said Suzanne Maloney, an expert on U.S.-Iran relations who is the vice president of foreign policy at the Brookings Institution.

“We’ve had immense success in achieving specific military objectives, but as long as Iran can dictate the end date for the war and still retain a pathway to nuclear weapons capability, it’s a strategic catastrophe,” she said.

One risk for the administration is that Tehran’s incentives regarding its nuclear stockpile may have changed, with hard-liners empowered and potentially open to developing a crude nuclear device, diplomats and analysts said.

Whether Iran can access the stockpile of enriched uranium gas is unknown. The canisters holding the gas are believed to be buried under rubble after the U.S. bombing of nuclear sites in June. Whether Iranian engineers and scientists could convert that gas into material for a dirty bomb is also uncertain.

Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, who was killed in the opening attack of the war, helped craft decades of resistance to the United States and its allies. He embraced his country’s nuclear ambitions as a bargaining chip — one that was valuable even if the nuclear program stayed just below the threshold needed for a weapon.

His son and successor, Mojtaba Khamenei, may have different calculations or may not possess the authority and power to hold back more extreme members of the Iranian security establishment should they push toward a bomb.

“We’ve stirred up a hornet’s nest and made it even more hard-line,” said Brian Katulis, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute.

Iran’s ability to pose a global security threat has claimed the attention of every president since Jimmy Carter. Republicans and Democrats alike have struggled with the country’s proxies, its nuclear ambitions and its sponsoring of terrorism around the world.

Former president Barack Obama gambled that a major part of his legacy would be a 2015 agreement that imposed sharp controls on Tehran’s nuclear program. Trump abandoned that agreement after he took office in 2017, saying it was too lenient. At the time, Democrats said abandoning the pact would eventually lead to war with Iran, an accusation that Trump allies denied.

Asked at a news conference Friday about Iran’s nuclear fuel stockpile, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth declined to say whether U.S. forces planned a ground incursion to attempt to secure the highly enriched uranium or whether the Trump administration planned to continue to rely on diplomacy to address the threat.

“The president’s kept his eye focused on nuclear capabilities,” Hegseth said. “And I will say, we have a range of options, up to and including Iran deciding that they will give those up, which of course we would welcome. They weren’t willing to do [that] in negotiations. I would not, never, tell this group or the world what we’re willing to do or how far we’re willing to go, but we have options for sure.”

Beyond the nuclear program, the joint U.S.-Israeli attack that started on Feb. 28, while blasting away a significant part of Iran’s military capability, has flipped a switch on threats from Iran, making concerns real that until recently were only theoretical. That includes attacks on oil tankers in the Strait of Hormuz, the 21-mile-wide choke point between Iran and Oman that squeezes ships coming and going from oil-rich nations such as Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates.

Before the war, the threat “was strategic and looming in the background and ever present,” Katulis said.

“Now it’s much more imminent and persistent,” he said. “It’s still early, but it may have made this regime even much more unpredictable, and it could take potshots at a moment’s notice in that strait.”

The White House said that Iranian action against the Strait of Hormuz has always been part of U.S. planning for an attack on the country.

Now that the war has started, however, the United States so far has proved unable to keep the waterway open. The U.S. Central Command said Tuesday that it had conducted strikes against Iranian mine-laying ships near the strait, a measure of U.S. concerns.

For now, the United States appears to be getting pulled more deeply into the fight because of the energy situation. On Friday, Trump declared that the U.S. military “totally obliterated” every military target on Kharg Island, a key Iranian energy transit chokepoint.

The next day, he called on China, France, Japan, South Korea, Britain and others to send ships to battle the “artificial constraint” of Iran’s attacks on ships in the Strait of Hormuz. It was a notable shift from the previous Saturday, when he gleefully told journalists aboard Air Force One that he had rejected a British offer to send aircraft carriers to the region.

Also on Friday, U.S. officials said that a Marine expeditionary unit would deploy from Japan to the Middle East, adding to the firepower in the region.

The unit includes more than 2,200 Marines and is complemented by more than 2,000 additional Navy personnel spread across three warships.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina), a hawkish lawmaker and Trump confidant who for years has advocated regime change in Iran, hinted that Marines could soon attack Kharg Island — a shift to a ground invasion that would be a major escalation.

“He who controls Kharg Island, controls the destiny of this war,” Graham posted on X. “Semper Fi.”

Semper Fi is the slogan of the Marines.

It was not clear whether the latest deployment has any connection to Kharg. The Marines are trained in amphibious landings, seizing islands and launching rocket artillery at adversaries at sea. The deployment was first reported by the Wall Street Journal.

Top Pentagon leaders say that the Strait of Hormuz is an increasing focus of their efforts, but they have tacitly acknowledged the challenge they face, despite having destroyed much of Iran’s navy.

“The only thing prohibiting transit in the straits right now is Iran shooting at shipping. It is open for transit, should Iran not do that,” Hegseth said at Friday’s news conference.

It may be some time before the U.S. military is able to address the strait problem, Energy Secretary Chris Wright said Thursday, telling CNBC that an operation might be ready by the end of the month.

Until then, the United States and its allies are being forced to take extraordinary measures to try to ease oil prices. The 32 member countries of the International Energy Agency announced Wednesday that they planned to release 400 million barrels of oil from their stockpiles, including 172 million barrels from the United States.

In another effort to deliver oil supplies to global markets, the Trump administration also suspended sanctions on Thursday against Russian oil exports, a setback for the president’s efforts to end the war in Ukraine.

The decision will deliver a windfall to the Kremlin’s coffers and potentially give it more resources to fund its fight.

As complicated as it may be to end the conflict now, it could get even trickier should the United States be pulled into some of the more ambitious versions of Trump’s objectives, including regime change, said Dan Shapiro, who was U.S. ambassador to Israel under Obama and is now a fellow at the Atlantic Council.

Trump could manage some of the challenges around the strait and the uranium without getting locked into an endless conflict with Tehran, he said.

“It’s not clear that Iran would accept a unilaterally declared ceasefire,” he said. “If they don’t, of course, the U.S. would have to respond, but that response can be shaped in a way that gets on a path toward gradual, mutual de-escalation. … That seems to me to be a wiser course than this ever-shifting set of objectives and really ever-receding endpoint, which we seem otherwise to be getting pulled toward.”