I think this is a combination of tunnel vision and polarization. The Occam's Razor explanation, which most of the cooler heads who believe the war is a bad idea have converged on, is that Israel-aligned politicians and other figures have been feeding Trump bad information, such that he has a drastically different picture of the situation on the ground than the people with eyes on have. Like Ulysses Grant, Trump comes from a world where it can be assumed that the people below you share your interests, provide reliable information, and will follow your orders in good faith. Unlike Ulysses Grant, this has been exploited by one very powerful lobby rather than a number of small, opportunistic ones. More concretely, the general sentiment is that there is no military action that could open the strait and that Iran no longer considers the U.S./Israel to be capable of good faith negotiation. But every neoconservative with access to the administration is loudly insisting that Iran is desperate to surrender unconditionally and that providing any of the guarantees needed to end the war would be folly. He asks to see the infrastructure and casualty data to support this, and they give him a fudged graph of Iranian missile launches. He asks to see evidence of Iranian willingness to surrender, and they tell him that some official has contacted them trying to arrange it. Neither of these things are true, but he has no means of finding that out. From what I've heard, he is becoming increasingly uncomfortable with this situation, but Israel is happily willing to break any ceasefire the administration sets up, and Kushner and Wilkoff are happy to ensure that any negotiations that occur do not go anywhere. Prior administrations had to deal with similar situations WRT Israel, but they had more political experience and understood that they had to threaten direct confrontation with Israel to get them to back down. tl;dr: The administration's ability to perceive the state of the war is u