The US midterms were a referendum on the Iran war and its devastating economic consequences, and the message delivered by the American people was loud and clear: the conflict should end as soon as possible.

Donald Trump’s own Vice President JD Vance broke with the pro-war Right to acknowledge as much. Meanwhile, following their midterms triumph, Democrats now see ending the war as their first priority. Party leaders have vowed to use Congress’s “power of the purse” to cut off funding for further military action in Iran, even threatening a government shutdown next month if required. “If the President wants to tell the country that he’s prepared to shut down the United States government in order to conduct an illegal and senseless war in Iran, that will be his choice,” senator Chris Van Hollen said on Friday.

While commentators have interpreted talk of congressional investigations and the public’s repudiation of Trump’s foreign policy as a sign that perhaps the worst of the Iran war is over, it would be wrong, as many have done, to treat the President as a lame duck. The administration is set to undergo a major shake-up, with Stephen Miller replacing Susie Wiles as White House chief of staff on Friday. As the Economist warned back in August, people “should stop dreaming of ducks. Instead, they should study mountain gorillas, and the violence of which an aging silverback male is capable when it senses its time is up.”

Really, the danger of an all-out war against Iran is as high as ever. Trump is under immense pressure to prove he is still in control. Though he has been effectively neutered in relation to a domestic agenda, the US Constitution offers American presidents more or less a free hand to conduct foreign policy. Trump is also deeply contemptuous of Iran for apparently sealing his political fate. He is a wounded animal, and attacking Iran now — even if only for a few weeks — provides an opportunity for revenge.

This would be unwise. US intelligence has consistently indicated that the Iran file, including its nuclear programme, lacks a military solution. Trump was sold a false bill of goods that he would be able to accomplish a Venezuela-style regime change in mere days by Benjamin Netanyahu and an inner circle who have personal and ideological ties to Israel, including War Secretary Pete Hegseth and Head of Centcom Brad Cooper.

Knowing Trump’s ambition to be remembered as a world-historical president, they appealed to his vanity and thymos, demanding that he deal a permanent blow to the Islamic Republic and solve the challenge that had mocked several of his predecessors. A network of pro-Israel neocons from Mark Levin to Marc Thiessen have already convinced him that “finishing the job in Iran” is his only path to a political legacy. The President still believes he can defeat Tehran, and scrutinising America’s force posture in the Middle East shows a country that has been preparing for combat.

There are strong indications that Trump had already decided to escalate the war before this month, but only delayed the operations until after the midterms for political considerations. Whatever the reasons for that decision — whether the Iran hawks truly believe that more bombs and destruction of infrastructure can force Tehran’s capitulation, or they just want to look tough before accepting the inevitable — the politics of the war have become at once more complex and more simple. More complicated because Democrats have the strong majorities needed to check the President’s war powers and hold people accountable. It’s also simpler, because Trump’s obsession with Iran seems to persist, and he has left his legacy hanging on the outcome of the war by the finest of threads.

It doesn’t have to be this way, though. The President has an opportunity to course-correct and listen to the most trustworthy advisers available to him: the American people. He can sideline his most belligerent aides, accept the new status quo in the Persian Gulf, abandon the obsolete Carter Doctrine, and make actual peace with Iran. That’s what he promised in 2024, and what his own son and Vice President are begging him to do now.

Iran’s resilience and the GOP’s disastrous midterms performance might have forced his hand, but were he to make a Nixonian shift on Iran, few would remember the context. History would simply recall that it was Trump who reached a détente with Iran and oversaw America’s long-overdue military withdrawal from the Middle East. If so, the Iran war debacle would have been a watershed moment, renouncing globalist interventionism and re-anchoring US foreign policy on America First.