President Donald Trump blinked again by extending the ceasefire with Iran.
His critics are mocking another TACO (“Trump always chickens out”) Tuesday after the president caved on one more personal red line days after warning there’d be “no more Mr. Nice Guy” if the Islamic Republic didn’t capitulate.
But the derision would be more justified if a president risked more Iranian and US lives by doubling down on what looks like an unwise war purely to preserve his tough-guy persona.
A haunting question about the Vietnam War that future Sen. John Kerry posed to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1971 seems apt here: “How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?”
Still, Trump’s climbdown cast fresh doubts on his wartime leadership skills on a day when Iran refused to show up to talks in Islamabad aimed at ending the war — leaving Vice President JD Vance cooling his heels at home.
Trump wrote on Truth Social that he’d put US attacks on hold at the request of Pakistan to allow Iran to send a proposal and until talks conclude one way or the other. He also argued that the process was complicated because Iran’s leadership was “seriously fractured.”
CNN reported that top officials believe there was little point in Vance traveling to Pakistan for the talks. They believe Iran didn’t reply to US proposals because its leaders don’t yet have consensus on their position or on how far to empower negotiations on the country’s uranium stockpile. One complicating factor may be that new Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei is in hiding and may be unable to transmit clear directions, the sources said.
This is possible, but it may also be a self-serving way to cover Trump’s climbdown. Doubts about Iranian diplomats’ authority to negotiate always cloud talks with the Islamic Republic. And it may also highlight the incoherence of US strategy, since the Iranian leadership’s fractures were exacerbated by Israeli assassination raids that wiped out top officials with the political clout to do deals.
One big Trump failure revealed
The president’s spin cannot obscure the most important takeaway from Tuesday: His strategy of using threats of overwhelming US military force to coerce Iran into surrendering at talks has now failed multiple times. Inside Iran, therefore, it must appear that Trump’s threats of military escalation lack credibility.
Iran also outwaited the US president on whether it would show up to proposed talks in Islamabad, making itself look stronger. And the president’s antipathy to more war suggests that Iran may have partially repaired its capacity to hit Gulf states and therefore its strategic deterrence.
“It doesn’t matter what the president will say or the vice president or the secretary of war will say. It has zero influence on the Iranian calculus,” Danny Citrinowicz, former head of the Iran branch of Israeli military intelligence, told Jim Sciutto on CNN International.
“From the Iranians’ standpoint, they have the upper hand. And if the US wants to escalate, it will escalate. And if (the US wants) an agreement, they have to accept the 10 points that they sent them through the Pakistanis,” Citrinowicz said, referring to a previous Iranian proposal that included many demands rejected by the US.
So, what happens next?
An optimist might hope the indefinite extension of the ceasefire will open up space for diplomacy to work. If Trump really means that it will last until discussions conclude, he could be talking weeks or months, since talks with Iran are always laborious.
The longer the ceasefire holds, the less Trump may want to pay the price to break it. Indirectly, this could give the president what he needs — the suspension of a war that hammered his approval ratings and the global economy and threatens to fuel a Democratic midterm election wave.
Still, Trump is notoriously changeable. Iran believes that on at least two occasions — before the strikes against its nuclear plants last year and before this year’s war — the US has appeared to cut short a diplomatic process with attacks.
But a ceasefire will not permanently solve Trump’s biggest problems.
The Strait of Hormuz, a vital oil transit route, remains closed by Iranian threats. If anything, Iran’s remnant leadership, now likely dominated by military hardliners, is even more extreme than before the war. Iran still has highly enriched uranium that would help it reconstitute a nuclear program — even if the material is buried under its nuclear plants. And its people are still repressed.
The challenge for diplomats, from Pakistan and elsewhere, will be to find a way for Trump to claim some kind of win.
One possible catalyst might be the US blockade of Iranian ports and ships.
Some analysts believe this was a bad idea, one bound to make it more difficult for Iran to save face and show up at the talks. Others credit it with creating new leverage.
One way forward may be for the US to try to barter away the blockade in exchange for Iran agreeing to open the strait. Then, a more formal diplomatic process could tackle thorny issues like Iran’s nuclear program, its missile threat and its demands for sanctions relief.
Richard Haass, president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, praised the administration for taking a beat. “Giving them some time and putting the ball in their court, letting them propose something rather than jamming them with an American position, I think this is much better,” Haass told CNN’s Kasie Hunt. “We’re not put in the position of putting on the table something that looks unrealistic or, from their point of view, insulting to their dignity or pride.”
There’s no guarantee Iran will respond favorably, even if it has a huge incentive to alleviate the severe economic stress that is hampering military reconstruction. And the time it will take for the US blockade to bite deep could be longer than the span of Trump’s political patience or the global economy’s capacity to bear the strait’s closure. Tehran’s brutal leaders may be ready to expose their people to almost endless amounts of pain.
Iran may also never agree to cede its leverage permanently on the Strait of Hormuz. That’s because this war has established that the price of any future attack on the Islamic Republic will result in the waterway’s closure and global economic carnage.
There may be some truth to administration claims that US and Israeli bombing was an operational triumph that weakened Iran’s regional and nuclear threat and perhaps even its murderous domestic repression machine.
But Trump’s initial decision to go to war — and the cumulative effect of weeks of his contradictory positions, confused strategy and erratic statements — risks putting the US on a path to strategic defeat.
That is, unless the president — and a broadened effort by key international players — can use his decision to hold off on more attacks to craft a way out.
