WASHINGTON (AP) — As the Iran war intensifies, President Donald Trump has prioritized efforts to calm the financial markets — trying to keep oil prices from exploding upward, stocks from cratering and interest rates from surging.

When the markets have flashed danger, Trump has been quick with a social media post or a remark to claim the war he launched last month could soon end. He’s publicly declared that the markets are doing better than he expected, even with the S&P 500 stock index declining over the past five weeks and the global oil benchmark up roughly 60%.

“I thought oil prices were going to go up higher than they are now,” Trump said at a Friday investor summit. “And I thought that we would see a bigger drop in stock. It hasn’t been that bad.”

With the Iran war, the White House has largely refrained from messaging more aggressively to voters about the economic consequences — choosing instead to try to contain any damage in the financial markets, which have swung wildly on the prospects of ceasefire or escalation in what has become a high-stakes guessing game about Trump’s next moves.

The Republican president showed the extremes of his messaging Monday before the U.S. stock market opened, writing in a social media post that great progress had been achieved on peace talks with Iran while also threatening civilian infrastructure such as desalination plants if a deal wasn’t reached “shortly.”

The White House sees the stock, energy and bond markets as a way to indirectly reach voters. Trump has staked his economic agenda on cheap prices at the pump, robust gains in 401(k) accounts and cheaper mortgage rates.

But that messaging appears to be wearing thin as the president’s various pronouncements have done little to change the reality that a large chunk of the world’s energy supplies is stranded by the conflict. Just 38% of U.S. adults approve of how he’s handling the economy and only 35% support him on Iran, according to a March survey by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.

The president has tried to dictate to markets instead of talking directly to Americans

Gene Sperling, a top economic adviser in the Democratic Clinton, Obama and Biden administrations, said voters can make a direct connection between prices at the pump and Trump’s choice to attack Iran. He said “simplistic jawboning” to the markets is insufficient for a public that is stuck paying the price as gasoline soars past $4 a gallon nationwide.

“Most advisers would say the president has to speak directly to the American people and fully acknowledge the economic pain that his policy has so directly caused in a short amount of time and make the case for why the national security concerns justify it,” Sperling said. “Instead, you have a strategy of not recognizing or even dismissing people’s economic pain.”

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt on Monday called the oil price increases a “short-term fluctuation.”

Trump’s strategy of giving mixed messages has started to work against him, said Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, a professor at the Yale University School of Management and co-author of the new book “Trump’s Ten Commandments: Strategic Lessons from the Trump Leadership Toolbox.”

“The uncertainty is now soaring,” Sonnenfeld said. “As the messaging to calm markets with false reassurances is having diminishing credibility in financial markets, so, too, has Trump diminished public confidence.”

Trump’s desire for flexibility on the war limits his ability to offer clarity

Trump has embraced having flexibility in how he chooses to conduct the war, even though this has muddled his stated objectives.

During a Cabinet meeting Thursday, he said Iran was “begging” for a deal even as he threatened further military action — all the while maintaining that any economic damage to the U.S. would reverse itself.

On Friday after the markets closed, he extended his deadline for Iran to open the Strait of Hormuza key waterway for the flow of oil, saying he would hold off on bombing Iran’s energy plants in the meantime.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Monday on Fox News Channel’s “Fox & Friends” that Iran was letting some tankers through the Strait of Hormuz and that the “market is well supplied” because countries are releasing their strategic petroleum reserves and sanctions have been removed for Russian and Iranian oil already on tankers.

“We are seeing more and more ships go through on a daily basis as individual countries cut deals with the Iranian regime for the time being,” Bessent said. “But over time, the U.S. is going to retake control of the straits, and there will be freedom of navigation, whether it is through U.S. escorts or a multinational escort.”

Graham Steele, a Biden-era Treasury official, said Trump’s messaging techniques “can work temporarily, but they have diminishing returns, over time,” if they’re detached from actual policies and results.

“We saw a lot of the volatile market reactions initially, when he kept announcing these things and then walking them back,” Steele said. “The market reaction now is just a steady trend upward in prices,” he noted, adding that markets are “not responding to it in the same way anymore.”

Confidence in the economy and Trump is fading without clear results

The University of Michigan’s Index of Consumer Sentiment on Friday fell to a reading of 53.3 in March, its lowest level since December. Joanne Hsu, director of the surveys of consumers, pointed to the financial market volatility “in the wake of the Iran conflict” as reducing confidence in the economy for households with middle and higher incomes.

Hsu noted that the survey indicated that people do not expect the higher energy costs and stock market declines to persist, but that could change if the war “becomes protracted or if higher energy prices pass through to overall inflation.”

Gus Faucher, the chief economist at PNC Financial Services, stressed that low levels of consumer sentiment do not automatically signal a recession. But he said consumers would have to see lower gas prices, a steady stock market and decreased mortgage rates to feel better about the economy, which likely means a definitive resolution to the conflict rather than a series of pronouncements by Trump.

“The proof is in the pudding,” Faucher said. “People need to see some substantive improvements before they feel better about conditions.”

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U.S. President Donald Trump on Monday threatened to target Iran’s energy infrastructure, including the country’s desalination plants. Such a move — and Iran’s possible targeting of the plants of its Gulf Arab neighbors — could have devastating impacts across the water-starved Middle East.

In a post on Truth Social, Trump said if a deal to end the war isn’t reached “shortly” and the Strait of Hormuzwhere much oil passes via tankers, is not immediately reopened, “we will conclude our lovely ‘stay’ in Iran by blowing up and completely obliterating all of their Electric Generating Plants, Oil Wells and Kharg Island (and possibly all desalinization plants!), which we have purposefully not yet ‘touched.’”

The biggest danger, analysts warn, may not be what Trump could do to Iran, but how Tehran could retaliate. Iran relies on desalination for a small share of its water supply while Gulf Arab states depend on it for the vast majority.

Hundreds of desalination plants sit along the Persian Gulf coast, putting individual systems that supply water to millions within range of Iranian missile or drone strikes. Without them, major cities — such as Dubai and Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates or Doha, Qatar’s capital — could not sustain their current populations.

“Desalination facilities are oftentimes necessary for the survival of the civilian population and intentional destruction of those types of facilities is a war crime,” said Niku Jafarnia, a researcher at Human Rights Watch.

While less reliant on desalination, Iran’s water situation is dire

After a fifth year of extreme drought, some Iranian media reports say reservoirs supplying Tehran, the country’s capital, are below 10% capacity. Satellite pictures analyzed by The Associated Press also show reservoirs noticeably depleted. The country still draws most of its water from rivers, reservoirs and depleted underground aquifers.

Israeli airstrikes on March 7 on oil depots surrounding Tehran produced heavy smoke and acid rain. Experts warned the fallout could contaminate soil and parts of the city’s water supply.

“Attacking water facilities, even one, could end up being harmful to the population in such a severe water scarcity context,” Jafarnia said.

Before the war that Israel and the United States launched on Feb. 28, Iran had been racing to expand desalination along its southern coast and pump some of the water inland, but infrastructure constraints, energy costs and international sanctions have sharply limited scalability.

Across the Gulf, many desalination plants are tied to power stations

In Kuwait, about 90% of drinking water comes from desalination, along with roughly 86% in Oman and about 70% in Saudi Arabia. The technology removes salt from seawater — most commonly by pushing it through ultrafine membranes in a process known as reverse osmosis — to produce the freshwater that sustains cities, hotels, industry and some agriculture across one of the world’s driest regions.

Even where the plants are connected to national grids with backup supply routes, disruptions can cascade across interconnected systems, said David Michel, senior fellow for water security at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

“It’s an asymmetrical tactic,” he said. “Iran doesn’t have the same capacity to strike back … But it does have this possibility to impose costs on the Gulf countries to push them to intervene or call for a cessation of hostilities.”

Desalination plants have multiple stages — intake systems, treatment facilities, energy supplies — and damage to any part of that chain can interrupt production, according to Ed Cullinane, Mideast editor at Global Water Intelligence, a publisher serving the water industry.

“None of these assets are any more protected than any of the municipal areas that are currently being hit by ballistic missiles or drones,” Cullinane said.

The Gulf produces about a third of the world’s crude exports and energy revenues underpin national economies. Fighting has already halted tanker traffic through key shipping routes and disrupted port activity, forcing some producers to curb exports as storage tanks fill.

“Everyone thinks of Saudi Arabia and their neighbors as petrostates. But I call them saltwater kingdoms. They’re human-made fossil-fueled water superpowers,” said Michael Christopher Low, director of the Middle East Center at the University of Utah. “It’s both a monumental achievement of the 20th century and a certain kind of vulnerability.”

Trump’s comments came as the conflict intensified, with Tehran striking a key water and electrical plant in Kuwait and an oil refinery in Israel coming under attack, while U.S. and Israeli forces launched a new wave of strikes on Iran.

US and Gulf governments have long recognized the risk

A 2010 CIA analysis warned that attacks on desalination facilities could trigger national crises in several Gulf states, and prolonged outages could last months if critical equipment were destroyed. More than 90% of the Gulf’s desalinated water comes from just 56 plants, the report stated, and “each of these critical plants is extremely vulnerable to sabotage or military action.”

Saudi Arabia and the UAE have invested in pipeline networks, storage reservoirs and other redundancies designed to cushion short-term disruptions. But smaller states such as Bahrain, Qatar and Kuwait have fewer backup supplies.

Desalination has expanded in part because climate change is intensifying drought across the region. The plants themselves are highly energy-intensive and emit massive amounts of carbon, while their coastal locations make them vulnerable to extreme weather and rising seas.

Past Mideast conflicts have seen attacks on desalination plants

During Iraq’s 1990-1991 invasion of Kuwait, retreating Iraqi forces sabotaged power stations and desalination facilities, said Low, from the University of Utah, while millions of barrels of crude oil were deliberately released into the Persian Gulf, which threatened seawater intake pipes used by desalination plants across the region.

Workers rushed to deploy protective booms around the intake valves of major facilities but the destruction left Kuwait largely without fresh water and dependent on emergency water imports. Full recovery took years.

In recent years, Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi rebels have targeted Saudi desalination facilities as tensions escalated.

International humanitarian law, including provisions of the Geneva Conventions, prohibit targeting civilian infrastructure indispensable to the survival of the population, including drinking water facilities.

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Follow Annika Hammerschlag on Instagram @ahammergram.

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