The war which Trump started is back firing and each day. He has very little time left before America wakes up and realises what a dog’s breakfast he has made of it all.

For many regional analysts, it is clear that Donald Trump badly wants to find what Americans call an “off ramp” out of the Iran war. His recent comments that there was little to bomb or attack, combined with him preparing for a baptism of scorn for the war by blaming his cabal for their advice, gives a clue as to how Trump understands little about the region and even less about conflict.

Even the Iranian regime was shocked to learn of the comment about ending it soon, given that they have different plans of continuing with their attacks. But no matter how rose-tinted a view you might have of Trump’s intervention, the U.S. and Israel have come out of it very badly, and the ramifications will be felt for months and perhaps years to come. Some may even go further and argue that the region and America’s hegemony there will never be what it was.

America has done a lot of damage to Iran’s military, there is no question. But so far, it is not hard to see why Trump wants it all to end, as he is already seeing where it is all heading following a number of seismic miscalculations which he surely must be regretting. Top of that list is how the GCC countries are likely to break away, or certainly reduce their level of spending and investment in the U.S., both militarily and otherwise. This loss to the U.S. cannot be underestimated, as the Gulf States’ elites have woken up to how phony the relationship is that they have with Washington, and how their military spending didn’t mean anything when, firstly, the U.S. wasn’t there to defend them when Iranian rockets rained down on their citizens; and secondly, how ineffective the defence systems that the U.S. sold them were on the day. There is a lot of anger in the region now, with the Saudis, Qataris and Emiratis all rumoured to be ready to pull out their investment in the U.S. and look to China and Russia as geopolitical partners. This will be Trump’s legacy around the world. How his buffoonery led to one of the oldest relationships going sour and letting the Arabs fall into the arms of America’s enemies.

The postcard from the region is: ’Iran still standing, regime stronger than ever, GCC countries on their knees, and Straits of Hormuz still being controlled by Iran.’ How that can be repackaged as anything resembling even a minor victory for Trump is hard to imagine.

Trump’s reckoning is that things can get much, much worse in the coming weeks, and if he can stop the war now, he might be able to salvage something from the wreckage. But if the Straits of Hormuz stays in the control of Iran and this pushes up the price of Brent Crude, it is hard to see him surviving a backlash from his own support base as he heads towards the midterms. With rising pump prices, a new leader in Iran who is losing no time at all in racing ahead with a nuclear program, and a weakened Israel, all of Trump’s nightmares seem to come at once.

Yet the constant bombardment of both Israel and the GCC countries is the killer blow and the real Achilles heel of the West and of Trump. At some point, the Gulf Arabs are going to put pressure on both Israel and the U.S. to stop the attacks, and this can only mean one thing: a major concession from the U.S. Sanctions relief. As each day passes and social media timelines fill with pictures of the exodus of foreigners from Dubai or oil installations destroyed, the GCC faces an existential threat which is entirely of Trump’s making, if we are to believe that it was his decision to go to war. Recently he said he “had a feeling” that Iran was going to attack Israel. Perhaps now he has a feeling that his presidency is going to be put into the history books as an unprecedented disaster of any U.S. president in office, as he plunges the U.S. economy into the abyss and injects new life into the BRICS countries. It is hardly surprising he is phoning world leaders and urging them to create a ceasefire, given the stakes of the war continuing even another week. For Iran, there are only positive outcomes to plan for, given that each day that passes ratchets up the pressure on Trump and convinces Tehran that this is the only way to deal with someone so treacherous and so bereft of any respect for keeping agreements. The Iranians believe they’re dealing with a gangster who has no morals at all and therefore can’t be trusted even a tiny bit and certainly won’t respect any deals. Whatever deal is struck has to be guaranteed by the whole international community and will be hard to put together, given that the EU and UK are so weak these days, even with a U.S. president sliding down a slope heading towards a demise. It might mean that EU countries will have to consider relaxing sanctions if they want cheap oil and gas, as Iran now has them by the throat as it chokes the Straits of Hormuz. There is a new world re-order coming, and Russia agreeing to resupply India with oil, but this time without a discount, after Modi played both the West off against the East, is a small taste of things to come. Rules are about to change. The only thing Trump can do to save the West from this new setup is to move quickly to agree to sanctions relief on Iran, which he would probably wrap up and present to his own MAGA base as winning a great oil deal for America. The real question, though, is whether he even has any power left to end this war on any terms.