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In the weeks leading up to the U.S. war with Iran, President Trump cheered on the Iranian protesters rising up against their government, telling them that they should “save the names of the killers and abusers” and that he would come to their aid.

But more than five months into the conflict, liberating the Iranian people has been one of the war’s most glaring unfulfilled objectives.

In an interview this summer, Mr. Trump acknowledged that he never really believed that the uprising he encouraged would happen anyway because Iranian security forces would crush the demonstrators.

Iran has executed at least 26 people in connection with the January protests since Mr. Trump made his promise, with many more protesters potentially at risk, according to Amnesty International. U.S. officials believe Iran’s new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, is even more interested in pursuing a nuclear weapon than his father, who was killed in an airstrike on the opening day of the war.

More than 1,700 Iranian civilians have died in the war, according to the U.S.-based Human Rights Activists News Agency. That figure includes at least 175 people — most of them children — who died in an airstrike that hit a school on the first day of the war.

Privately, U.S. military officials have acknowledged that American forces carried out the school strike and cast it as an intelligence failure. But Mr. Trump has brushed aside questions about who was responsible, saying in June: “Mistakes are made. War is nasty.”

His references to the horrors facing Iranian civilians during the war have been mostly in passing, and they have grown less fervent as the months go by.

And as Iranians remain locked in crisis, Mr. Trump is looking for a way out. Negotiators are working on a deal to restart shipping traffic in the Strait of Hormuz, which Iran has effectively shut down, as Mr. Trump tries to extricate the United States from a conflict that has lasted far longer, and proved far more costly, than he anticipated.