Gallup Confidence Hits -45 as Iran War Enters Fourth Month

Friday's Gallup Economic Confidence Index reading of -45 — the worst since the 2022 cost-of-living crisis — was the day's clearest data point on what the Iran war has done to American sentiment. Only 16 percent of respondents called the economy good or excellent; 49 percent rated it poor, 34 percent fair; 76 percent said conditions are getting worse against 20 percent who said better. The average US price of a gallon of petrol has risen to $4.55 from less than $3 before the U.S. and Israel began their war on Iran in late February, and consumer prices overall rose in March and April, government data show. The Gallup release lands on top of a New York Times/Siena poll earlier in the week showing only 31 percent approve of President Donald Trump's handling of the war. Trump dismissed the political cost in remarks earlier this month: "I don't think about Americans' financial situation. I don't think about anybody. I think about one thing: We cannot let Iran have a nuclear weapon."

The Strait of Hormuz crisis itself is now approaching its fourth month, structured by mutual blockade. Iran charges ships up to $2 million for safe passage; Washington runs a US Central Command naval embargo on vessels entering or leaving Iranian ports. FDD senior fellow Miad Maleki estimated Iran is losing roughly $435 million per day in trade, with public finances down approximately $17 billion as of Friday. Trump used Friday to harden the US line on both Hormuz and uranium: he said the United States opposes any tolls on shipping through the strait and vowed Iran will not be allowed to retain its highly enriched stockpile, aligning the position with the State Department's April legal justification of the war on collective and inherent self-defence grounds.

The diplomacy track ran in parallel. Pakistani Field Marshal Asim Munir, who has mediated between Washington and Tehran since February, landed in Tehran on Friday and was received by Iranian Interior Minister Eskandar Momeni to finalise a US-Iran letter of intent covering an end to the war and principles for broader negotiations; Secretary of State Marco Rubio acknowledged slight progress. Qatar separately dispatched mediators to Tehran for talks said to be close to a memorandum of understanding on reopening the strait, after Iran allowed the first Qatari LNG tanker to transit since the war began. A Foreign Affairs analysis published the same day — the day's flagship global piece — argued the Hormuz precedent has lowered the threshold for closures of the Strait of Malacca (40% of global trade), the Taiwan Strait (where a Bloomberg-cited estimate puts a blockade at 5.3 percent of global GDP) and the Luzon and Lombok straits, including a US-Philippine localised-denial exercise drawing Chinese live-fire responses.

Outside the war story, Israel-policy friction widened. Eleven countries — eight of them European — summoned Israeli ambassadors over a circulating video showing National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir overseeing the mistreatment of detained activists from the Global Sumud Flotilla. The UN's Palestine agency, in a parallel release, reported more than 125,000 skin-infection cases recorded in Gaza linked to rats and parasites during the first five months of 2026. On the US economic side, financial markets priced in a 2026 interest-rate increase under new Federal Reserve Chair Kevin Warsh — a tightening expectation that compounds the Gallup reading rather than offsetting it.