Democrats' overwhelming victory in the 3 November midterm congressional elections may have upended President Donald Trump's plans to address the Iran war once the US political campaign came to an end.
Trump, who had indicated he would no longer feel constrained over resuming large-scale hostilities with Iran after the midterms, has had to contend with unusual public criticism from his vice president JD Vance, who argued that the Republicans' rout at the poll was entirely because of the war.
The Trump White House also has to spend political capital to stave off an attempt by the outgoing, majority-Republican House of Representatives to impeach defense secretary Pete Hegseth. Representative Thomas Massie (R-Kentucky), a critic of both Trump and Hegseth, plans to force the House next week to vote to start impeachment proceedings against the Pentagon chief and can expect support from Democratic lawmakers and, perhaps, from some other Republicans.
Dissatisfaction over the conduct of the war and its effects on the US and global economy had been building up in Congress even before the midterms. But the few Republican lawmakers who spoke out against the war mostly directed their ire at Hegseth, rather than Trump or senior military commanders.
Hegseth in a video address on Thursday hit back at critics and defended his conduct of the war against Iran. Hegseth called Massie "a disgruntled, defeated congressman" and predicted that the impeachment attempt against him would fail just as two previous attempts to impeach Trump did. "It didn't work against President Trump, and it won't work with me," Hegseth said.
"My Hegseth impeachment resolution is a much gentler version of what's coming when (the Democrats) control Congress," Massie said in response. Massie called on Trump to fire Hegseth and pick a replacement to be confirmed by the outgoing, majority-Republican Senate.
Trump, who initially appeared non-committal about Hegseth's future, lent him support on Thursday. "Pete Hegseth has done a fantastic job," Trump told reporters on Thursday. "In Iran, we are there for seven months, and we control everything that we wanted to control."
Expectations that the Democratic victory at the midterms would advance a peaceful resolution of the war helped lower WTI next-month futures by around 6pc in the past week. But the reality on the ground has not changed.
Oil exports from the Mideast Gulf remain below pre-war levels despite the US military effort to de-bottleneck the strait of Hormuz. Tehran is insisting that Trump's administration implement the commitments it agreed to in the June memorandum of understanding, including on sanctions relief and the repatriation of frozen US assets.
The lameduck Congress separately will have to vote on a White House request, submitted in July, for $67bn in emergency funding to pay for the Iran war. The cost of the war likely has climbed substantially higher since then. And the funding request does not cover the estimated damage to multiple US Army, naval and air force bases across the Middle East hit by Iranian missiles and drones since March.
But any effort to reject the Pentagon's emergency funding request may not garner sufficient support. The measure aims to replenish US inventories of precision munitions, which have been heavily depleted during the war with Iran. That critical materiel is also used by Ukraine's military under a European-funded program, and keeping those stocks depleted at a time of heightened global tensions would be controversial.
"It's important for the president, before we even cross over into the new Congress, to end this war in Iran," House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-New York) said on 4 November.
