America is at war again. This time, just like the last time (Venezuela), the war has seemingly been launched completely on a whim from the Oval Office. Little or no effort was made by Donald Trump (or anyone in his administration) to explain to the American public the reasons for launching a war right now, the objectives of this war, or any expectations whatsoever about how it will be fought, how long it will be fought, and what is supposed to come afterwards. Perhaps Trump has just completely given up on his fervent wish for a Nobel Peace Prize? It's hard to figure -- just like pretty much everything about this war.

Trump's reasons for going to war shift on a daily -- sometimes hourly -- basis. The mainstream media has gotten so comfortable "sane-washing" Trump's utterances that it now appears astonished that there is in fact no logic or reasoning behind what Trump says and does; that it is instead all just off-the-cuff and ad-libbed. Trump is on somewhat of a media charm offensive, having granted multiple media outlets phone-in interviews (all of them short, one-on-one interviews with individual journalists) over the weekend. But this effort raised more questions than it answered, because Trump's answers to the various reporters contradict each other and are downright confusing (at best). Which is pretty much par for Trump's course, if you live outside the "we've got to sane-wash this so it sounds remotely presidential" media bubble. Anyone expecting deep logical reasoning about any of this should remind themselves that the time for that sort of thing was a week ago, in Trump's annual State Of The Union address. Trump devoted only three minutes (out of 108) to the subject of Iran, and he fell far short of laying out a real case to the American public for war, even though that would have been the key time to do so.

After the first few days of war, I am personally struck by two things. The first is that an end to this war might come as a direct result of economic factors, and the second is that if the war drags on for more than a week or two then the end might come because of logistical military realities.

The media is already reporting on the first of those, ever since the oil markets opened up for the week. And you can read "opened up" in both senses of the term. Taken together with the stock markets heading down, this is going to put some serious political pressure on Trump -- and, importantly, pressure that he actually pays attention to.

The price of a gallon of gasoline at the pumps in America is a very big deal in American politics, of course. Trump has been trumpeting how wonderful he's made everything, pretty much since right after he took office for the second time, but mostly this has been nothing short of (if you'll excuse the pun) gaslighting the American public. He's been crowing about gas being "$1.99 a gallon" since last spring, even though it just isn't true. In actual fact, according to GasBuddy.com, the price of gas hasn't changed all that much under Trump at all.

The day Trump was sworn into office, the average national price of a gallon of gasoline was $3.10 a gallon. For almost all of the rest of 2025, it stayed pretty close to that (while remaining a bit above it, for the most part). It stayed within the rage of $3.00 to $3.25, and if you remove the high spike and low spike, it mostly stayed between $3.10 and $3.20. In October, the price started heading down to around $3.00, but then it stalled and rose back to $3.10 or so. Then in November, the price really did come down -- but nowhere near as much as Trump likes to brag about. By the start of the new year, gas was down to around the $2.75 range. The overall drop was about 11 percent from when Trump took office (and most of 2025), to put this another way. That's good news for consumers, but it is also not an enormous difference.

Since then, the price of gas has climbed back up. It rose above $2.90 at the start of last month, and was in the range of $2.88 to $2.99 in the weeks just prior to Trump launching his new war (the last price before the news of the war broke was $2.94 a gallon). Today the price continued spiking dramatically upwards (since the war news broke), to $3.15 a gallon. That's more than a 20-cent hike in only two days of oil market trading, and it is expected to continue.

That's the realty of gas prices over Trump's term. Today, prices stand at a nickel more than the day he took office. But they're heading upwards, since Iran has threatened to completely shut down the Strait of Hormuz, through which 20 percent of the world's oil travels. And Trump is sensitive to this metric. How eager will he be to negotiate an end to the war if the price continues to spike upwards and starts to become a real political liability for him (and his fellow Republicans)? How high would it have to go? $3.30 a gallon? $3.50? $4.00? Trump is already worried about it -- today, in answer to a question about it, he replied: "If we have a little high oil prices for a little while, but as soon as this ends, those prices are going to drop, I believe, lower than even before."

The stock market could prove to be even more immediate, in terms of forcing Trump to the negotiating table. As seen with his "Liberation Day" tariffs, when Wall Street expresses serious reservations about Trump's policies, he can back down quickly. So far, American stock markets haven't taken as big a hit as foreign markets have, but if the slump continues it could indeed influence how much political capital Trump is willing to expend on the whole war idea.

But the real external pressure which may wind up dictating an end to this war hinges on the answer to the question of which side has more missiles. Iran has launched thousands of missiles and drones at various targets around it, including American military bases in the region, soft targets in places like the Gulf states, and (of course) Israel. Most of these have reportedly been intercepted and shot down in one way or another. So to state it bluntly: which side is going to run out first?

This is a war of attrition. There are no "boots on the ground" anywhere (so far), either within Iran or elsewhere. The whole war is being waged in the air. As things stand, American and Israeli warplanes have achieved air superiority over Iran, meaning they've knocked down all the air defense systems and radars that Iran had deployed. They can bomb pretty much anywhere they wish, to put it another way.

But Iran is still launching missiles and drones. Most are not reaching their targets, but some are. Many are being taken out in midair by interceptor missiles. In Cold War language, these are mostly surface-to-air anti-missile missiles. They are designed to defend against missile and drone attacks. And as we've seen, they do a pretty impressive job of it. But how many of them does America and the Gulf states and Israel actually have? That could be the crucial question.

The media is just beginning to pay some attention to this equation. Trump has even responded with his usual bluster, stating: "The United States Munitions Stockpiles have... never been higher or better... we have a virtually unlimited supply of these weapons. Wars can be fought 'forever,' and very successfully, using just these supplies." But then he goes on to contradict all of that with some caveats ("At the highest end, we have a good supply, but are not where we want to be"). But a military analyst speaking to the Wall Street Journal just admitted "we're using them [interceptors] faster than we can replace them."

Interceptor missiles can cost (at the low end) hundreds of thousands of dollars up to (the high end) millions of dollars each. The drones Iran has been using (some of them successfully, as we've all seen in the videos) cost something like $35,000 each. That is a huge disparity. During the "12-Day War" with Israel last year -- when we bombed Iran's nuclear facilities -- Israel was hit by wave after wave of missiles and drones. By the end of it, they were reportedly running low on their own interceptors. And when you run low on interceptors, you have to make painful decisions about what sites are worth defending and which ones you have to leave defenseless.

America has a different calculation than Israel. It has to not only deploy weapons in this war, it also has to hold back a reserve, just in case another war breaks out somewhere (such as China making a move on Taiwan, for instance). And we don't have the overwhelming competitive edge we had back in World War II, where American industrial might was such a decisive factor. America wasn't being bombed, so the factories here kept churning out tanks and warplanes and warships at a rate that none of the Axis powers could match. We simply don't have that edge anymore. Even in the Ukraine war, we have struggled to keep Ukraine supplied with Howitzer rounds (which are not that technologically advanced, when compared to an interceptor missile). And if we can't even make artillery shells fast enough for a modern war, we certainly don't have the ability to crank out Patriot missiles faster than we use them up.

Trump is wrong. We can't wage this kind of war "forever." The only way we could is if we could build them faster than we use them -- and we can't. Eventually the stockpiles are going to grow thin. For Israel, defending itself against this sort of sustained attack last year depleted their stockpiles within a few weeks. So if the current war lasts that long, the deciding factor in which side blinks first and starts seriously demanding negotiations may just depend on which side runs out of ammo first. This is a problem that is as old as the concept of war, really -- it is nothing new. But it might become the deciding factor in how long all of this continues and what sort of agreement is reached at the end of it.

-- Chris Weigant

Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigant