Trump Predicts Iran War Will End 'Very Soon' as Houthis Push Toward a Second Shipping Chokepoint

A carrier group at war footing, and a president predicting an end date

Since Yemen's displacement crisis climbed toward 50,000 people and Houthi forces held onto a seized Red Sea island, the fight has kept widening. Fox News reported Saturday that President Trump predicts the Iran war will end "very soon," with the network's own framing suggesting that timeline likely lands after the midterm elections.

No ceasefire terms, negotiation framework, or Iranian counteroffer has been reported. The prediction stands alone as a political statement, not an announced deal.

On the ground, or rather at sea, there's no sign of de-escalation. Fox News chief foreign correspondent Trey Yingst, reporting from aboard the USS George Washington in the Arabian Sea, described more than 5,000 sailors supporting what the Navy is calling Operation Epic Fury. Fighter jets launched one after another in nighttime operations Saturday, with guided-missile destroyers forming a defensive ring around the carrier.

One of those ships, the USS Shoup, carries Tomahawk missiles and coordinates strike-group defenses, according to an officer aboard the vessel who spoke to Fox News. "The crew is ready and equipped to respond as quickly as necessary," the officer said. Yingst reported Iran has escalated attacks on U.S. warships over the past week and a half, including a strike attempt on the George Washington itself the previous weekend.

A second chokepoint in play

The Strait of Hormuz has been disrupted for weeks. Now Fox News reports Houthi forces are advancing along Yemen's coast toward the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, the narrow passage linking the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden. If Houthi forces control approaches to both chokepoints, that's a direct threat to global oil and container shipping routes that no single carrier group can fully offset.

Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian rejected any notion of backing down. "If Americans are warriors, let them face our valiant military forces," he wrote on X Saturday. "Why wage war on civilian infrastructure, food supplies, and livelihoods? If they're human, why deny people access to water, food, and medicine? Our people can't be bullied into submission. Iran won't surrender."

Pezeshkian's claim that the U.S. is deliberately targeting civilian infrastructure and basic necessities is his government's characterization. No independent confirmation of that specific claim appears in these sources. This is Tehran's public messaging rather than a verified account of U.S. targeting.

Fukuyama's warning, and his own history of being misread

Francis Fukuyama, the Stanford political scientist best known for "The End of History and the Last Man," is out with a new memoir, "In the Realm of the Last Man," and used a Bloomberg interview Saturday to argue the Iran war risks repeating the same failure as Iraq and Afghanistan: military power alone rarely produces lasting political change.

That's a specific, falsifiable historical claim, not a prediction anyone can verify in real time. Whether it applies to Iran the way it applied to Iraq's occupation or Afghanistan's twenty-year war depends on what the U.S. is actually trying to accomplish there. A war aim that hasn't been clearly stated in these sources extends beyond stopping attacks on shipping and warships.

Fukuyama also used the moment to revisit his own most famous, and most misunderstood, idea. In an interview with the Guardian's Jonathan Friedland, carried by Vijesti, Fukuyama said his 1989 essay was widely read as predicting the end of conflict itself, a reading he calls "naive liberal triumphalism" that he never intended. He's fielded that same misreading, he said, "several times a week" for over three decades.

In the same interview, Fukuyama took a direct shot at Trump, saying of him: "As long as he can make money, he doesn't mind tyranny." That's Fukuyama's own characterization of the president, offered in a memoir-promotion interview, not an established fact. It should be read as one academic's political judgment rather than a neutral finding.

Where the framing splits

Middle East Eye's 25th-anniversary retrospective on the war on terror argues that "neoconservatives and their Zionist allies" exploited the September 11 attacks to pursue a project of remaking the Middle East by force. That's a loaded characterization specific to Middle East Eye's own framing, not a claim these sources independently substantiate. Readers should treat it as that outlet's editorial argument rather than settled history.

The stronger, more defensible version of the skeptics' case, the one Fukuyama himself makes without the conspiratorial framing, is narrower: occupying and rebuilding foreign societies by force has a poor track record, Iraq and Afghanistan being the clearest examples, and that history is a legitimate reason to ask what the endgame in Iran actually is before assuming military pressure alone gets there.

The open question going into the midterms is whether Trump's "very soon" holds up against a Houthi force that's actively expanding its reach toward a second chokepoint, with no reported negotiation track and an Iranian government publicly vowing not to surrender.