Tuesday was one of the more bizarre days in U.S. diplomatic history. It began with President Donald Trump warning that, should Iran not reopen the Strait of Hormuz, “a whole civilization will die tonight.” It ended with Trump proclaiming a two-week ceasefire and opening negotiations with Iran based on Tehran’s “10 point proposal.” There is rampant confusion about what those 10 points are, but the version released by Tehran calls for, among other things, Iranian control of the Strait of Hormuz, U.S. military withdrawal from the region and acceptance of Iran’s right to pursue nuclear enrichment — all conditions that should be utterly unacceptable to any U.S. administration.
It’s far from clear exactly what happened and what the consequences will be. On Wednesday, Iran threatened to withdraw from the agreement if Israel did not stop its attacks against Hezbollah in Lebanon. But, even if the ceasefire holds, it’s impossible to take seriously the claims of Trump supporters that his “madman” act delivered a U.S. victory in the five-week war.
It is true that Iran suffered considerable economic and military damage, but it remained capable of launching an average of 85 drones and 37 missiles a day. It’s also impossible to credit Trump’s boast that regime change — one of his initial war aims — has already occurred. It’s the same old awful regime, even if the players at the top have changed.
Despite Trump’s claim that “the United States will, working with Iran, dig up and remove all of the deeply buried … Nuclear ‘Dust’,” there was no indication of any actual agreement to remove nearly 1,000 pounds of enriched uranium from Iran. Nor was there any agreement on Iran’s part to end its support for regional proxies such as the Houthis, Hamas and Hezbollah.
And, of course, Iran remains able to control, at least for now, which ships transit the Strait of Hormuz — which it was not doing when this war began. Far from vowing to break the Iranian choke hold on one of the world’s most vital strategic arteries, Trump was talking on Wednesday about going into business with Iran to collect tolls in violation of a centuries-old U.S. commitment to maintain freedom of navigation around the world.
Keeping sea lanes open was the principle that led the nascent U.S. republic to fight the Barbary Wars against the piratical states of North Africa early in the 19th century. If the U.S. commitment to keeping an international waterway like the Strait of Hormuz clear for ships of any nation is now being abandoned, that would represent a significant and costly defeat. A “Tehran toll” on maritime traffic could deliver tens of billions of dollars in revenue for the Iranian regime — money that could be plowed into rebuilding its weapons industry.
It’s obvious what happened: Trump blundered into the war expecting a quick victory and was not prepared for Iran’s willingness and ability to target the Persian Gulf states and to close the Strait of Hormuz. In a deep dive into the war’s origins, the New York Times reported on Wednesday that Trump “had dismissed that possibility” of the strait’s closure “on the assumption that the regime would capitulate before it came to that.”
When that bet didn’t pay off, Trump must have looked around frantically for some way to force the Iranians to open up the strait — without finding it. The Defense Department sent U.S. ground forces to the region but didn’t use them. Trump probably calculated that the risk of casualties was too great if the United States tried to occupy Iranian territory, even temporarily.
The president then took to threatening U.S. airstrikes on Iran’s electrical infrastructure and bridges; echoing Gen. Curtis LeMay during the Vietnam War, he vowed to bomb Iran “back to the stone ages.” He didn’t carry out that threat, either, probably because Iran had vowed to retaliate against energy infrastructure and even desalination plants in the Persian Gulf kingdoms. If Iran had done so, the global energy crisis — already the worst ever — could have turned catastrophic.
With gasoline prices soaring and his approval rating plunging, Trump no doubt sensed that the U.S. public had scant patience for a prolonged and costly conflict with Iran. So he sought a hasty exit covered by a smoke screen of tough talk. In some ways, his gambit recalls the attempts of President Richard M. Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger to end the Vietnam War.
The U.S. and North Vietnam came to a one-sided peace agreement in October 1972, with the U.S. pledging to withdraw all its troops from South Vietnam while communist North Vietnam got to keep 150,000 troops in the south. But then Hanoi cooled to accepting even this favorable bargain.
So Nixon ordered up the “Christmas bombing,” pounding Hanoi with B-52s. North Vietnam thereupon signed the Paris Peace Accords in January 1973. A Kissinger aide quipped: “We bombed the North Vietnamese into accepting our concession.” What amounted to a U.S. surrender was thus camouflaged, at least temporarily, by Nixon’s bellicose words and actions.
In similar fashion, Trump gets to pretend that his bloodcurdling threats coerced Iran into giving up, when, in fact, he has so far given up more than the mullahs did. This was no U.S. victory, but ending the war now, before the damage got even worse, was still the least-bad option. In keeping with the now-famous acronym for “Trump always chickens out,” the world greeted the latest serving of TACO with a sigh of relief.
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