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Just 90 minutes before his 8 p.m. ET deadline Tuesday, President Donald Trump called off Armageddon, at least for two weeks—his customary amount of time to delay harsh actions that he has threatened but, it turns out, doesn’t really want to take.
Both Trump and the leaders of Iran—which he had threatened to destroy as a civilization if it didn’t open the Strait of Hormuz—claimed victory in the war, which had raged on for more than five weeks before the announcement last night of a two-week ceasefire.
Trump and his supporters claim that his relentless military pressure and his threat to bomb the country “back to the Stone Age” is what compelled Iran to give in. The Iranians are claiming that they didn’t give in at all—that their regime is intact, despite the fact that U.S. bombs and missiles struck 13,000 Iranian targets and that Israeli airstrikes killed the top echelon of their leaders.
Certainly, Iran emerges from this war gravely wounded, but far from extinguished as a regional power. And indeed, a 10-point plan that its leaders proposed, and that Trump accepted as grounds for a ceasefire and the basis of negotiations, gives Iran almost every advantage.
The plan, which Pakistan’s leaders presented to Trump on Iran’s behalf, opens up the Strait of Hormuz to commercial traffic—but only in coordination with the Iranian military. In short, it proposes to give Iran control over the strait, which it did not have before the war began.
The plan also demands that the U.S. and other Western countries drop all economic sanctions against Iran, that Iran be allowed to enrich uranium (as enshrined, to some extent, as a “right,” by the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty), that the ceasefire extend to Israel’s attacks on Lebanon, and that the U.S. withdraw from all its military bases in the Middle East. If taken literally, this would include some of the largest air and naval bases that the United States holds in the world.
The fact that Trump accepted this list as a starting point for negotiations, and as good enough reason for dropping his threat to destroy Iran, tells Iranians (and everybody else in the world) that his threat wasn’t serious to begin with. He clearly realized, as the countdown clock clicked on, that he had overstepped and was eager, even desperate, for an off-ramp.
In the end, Trump stopped the war (for now, anyway) without achieving any of the goals that he has cited, at various times, as rationales for going to war.
Iran has not agreed to end its nuclear program—quite the contrary. (It is also believed to have almost 1,000 pounds of highly enriched uranium buried somewhere.)
The essence of the regime—a theocratic state ruled by an appointed supreme leader and empowered by a large, well-armed military—is still intact. (Trump has claimed success at “regime change” because the old leaders are dead and the new ones are less radical, but the first point is irrelevant, and the second has not yet been proven.)
Iran has fewer missiles and drones than it had before, but still more than enough to strike Israel and other countries in the region with missiles and drones.
Trump never had, and never articulated, a clear reason for going to war in the first place—at least not waging war so intensely. If he wanted to keep Iran from getting a nuclear weapon and thought diplomacy was a dead end, he could have bombed or raided the uranium sites (a repeat of what he did last summer but at different locations). If he wanted to wipe out Iran’s air force and navy, he could have done that and called it a day. There was no reason to destroy as much of the country as he did, much less to ponder destroying it completely.
U.S. military commanders did what they generally do before launching an air and naval campaign—they drew up a list of targets and ordered which weapons would hit which targets when. After a month of bombing, they managed to hit all but about 3,000 of the targets on the list.
In his televised address on Wednesday, his first public speech about the war, Trump hailed the “victories” that the U.S. military had achieved on the battlefield. But there were no victories. He didn’t understand that hitting targets is not the same as winning a war. The former is a tactical matter; the latter is a strategic aim—and in order to fulfill a strategic aim, you have to know what your strategy is; you have to define victory, something he never did.
Out of desperation, frustrated that Iran would not surrender despite all the damage, the president escalated his rhetoric, threatening to bomb Iran “back to the Stone Age,” obliterate it as a civilization. Perhaps he thought the threat—and the clear fact that American military power could inflict unspeakable destruction—would make the Iranians surrender. But surrender to what? He demanded so many things, so inconsistently, that even if the Iranians were willing to give in, they wouldn’t know what they needed to do. In any case, they didn’t give in; rather, they suspended the talks that they were having with Pakistani intermediaries. In the end, it was Trump who gave in—who accepted Iran’s 10 points (many of them objectively unacceptable) as the basis for a ceasefire and for negotiations to come.
What happens next is unclear. If this all works out well enough, Trump might conclude that threatening to blow another country to smithereens is a good bargaining ploy for future confrontations. The problem is, it might not work with another country.
If the current arrangement doesn’t work out, if the ceasefire doesn’t hold, if Iran insists on conditions that Trump won’t accept (and, in some cases, that no U.S. president would accept), then what happens? Does Trump resume the bombing? Does he escalate the war? To what end? To open the Strait of Hormuz without paying a fee to the Iranian military? Many will recall that passage through the strait was free before Trump started this war.
Whatever happens, the whole world is watching. Many leaders will conclude that Trump’s threats were never serious—and therefore that any threats he levels in the future, against them or others, won’t be serious either. TACO, they’ll all cry—Trump Always Chickens Out—though this too might be dangerous; at some point, he might not chicken out. To the extent other leaders mull this over, many will conclude that it’s time to develop their own nuclear weapons. Our allies may do this, realizing that the United States is no longer a reliable protector. (Some have already come to this conclusion.) Our adversaries or neutral powers may do this, as a deterrent against American aggression.
This is the world Trump has spawned with his baseless war and ultimately with his deranged threat to wipe out another country’s entire civilization. One recalls Talleyrand’s famous gibe at Napoleon for executing the Duke of Enghien in 1804: “It’s worse than a crime; it’s a mistake.” His point was that the murder turned Europe’s aristocracy against Napoleon—which had a ruinous effect on his rule.
If Trump had carried out his threat to destroy all of Iran, it would have been a hideous war crime. That he didn’t follow through makes issuing the threat, to begin with, a huge strategic blunder. The president of the United States is revealed as an aspiring war criminal, a terrorist by inclination. The revelation that his talk was all bluff—the fact that he would invoke such obscene language in the middle of a very real war, in which his orders were killing thousands of people, without thinking anything through—uncloaks him, further, as an unserious man.
He has eroded whatever moral high ground this nation ever stood on. He has scarred the image of the United States, not least among the Iranian people, many of whom have been pro-American (in part because their dread regime is anti-American) but who may now emerge distrustful of an American president who so callously talked of destroying their civilization. It is telling that Trump’s appalling threats coincided with Vice President J.D. Vance’s trip to Hungary, where he (with Trump’s backing) endorsed the reelection of Viktor Orbán, Europe’s biggest supporter of Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has been killing civilians and bombing civilian structures in Ukraine for five years—and who now no doubt sees a wink and nudge of validation not just in Trump and Vance’s verbal support but also in their bombing of civilians in Iran.
In a sense, we should be thankful that Trump backpedaled from his threat and halted the violence, at least for a while. But peace is hardly at hand, and Trump has no ground to stand on—he has no strategy for dealing with Iran, he has alienated most of our allies, and if diplomacy really is the next step, he has fired or otherwise lost a huge number of our diplomats and largely ignored those still at their posts, relying instead on a real-estate tycoon and a son-in-law, who know nothing about the big picture or the fine details, some of them very technical, of what needs to be discussed.
Trump says he will give Iran two weeks to negotiate a long-term peace. This, of course, is preposterous. It took 18 months for President Barack Obama’s team and their international allies to negotiate the nuclear deal with Iran, and that dealt only with its nuclear program. (By the way, contrary to Trump’s claims, this deal was quite effective in dismantling Iran’s nuclear program—until Trump scuttled it, an act that, more than any other factor, led us to our current predicament.) Peace talks now will have to address Iran’s enriched uranium, ballistic missiles, and the Strait of Hormuz. And the Iranians will come into the talks thinking they have the upper hand.
If little progress has been made after two weeks, what will Trump do—resume the war, extend the deadline, drop the whole subject and move on to the next invented crisis? Nobody knows, maybe not even Trump.
