Trump Takes the Off-Ramp From the Israeli-Iranian War
President Donald Trump expressed what every observer of the Middle East had been feeling on Tuesday morning. “I’m not happy with [Israel]. I’m not happy with Iran, either,” he told reporters on the White House lawn. “We basically have two countries that have been fighting so long and so hard that they don’t know what the fuck they’re doing.”
The Israeli-Iranian ceasefire that Trump had announced looked like it was going to unravel. In a post to Truth Social, he had given a confusing timeline for both sides to stop firing. As Israel launched one last massive air raid, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi denied that there was a ceasefire agreement but said Iran would consider the matter closed if Israel stopped shooting at 4 a.m. local time.
Three hours later, Iran launched its own final missile barrages at Israeli cities, and Iranian television announced that the ceasefire would actually take effect at 7:30 a.m., as Trump’s original post had suggested. After Iran launched two additional missiles around 10 a.m. local time, Israeli warplanes attacked an Iranian radar station, at which point Trump had his outburst. And then it was over.
The ceasefire was a strange, theatrical, inconclusive ending to a strange, theatrical, inconclusive war. Israel attacked Iran—while Iran was negotiating with the United States over its nuclear program—and then immediately asked the United States to join in. Trump obliged by bombing Iranian nuclear sites through Operation Midnight Hammer, and began talking about regime change. But Iran more or less ignored the U.S. attack, continued to hit Israel for two days, and then launched a choreographed retaliation on a single U.S. base that caused no casualties.
Trump stopped short of the most catastrophic outcome, a full-on war with Iran, and was able to flex his strength with Operation Midnight Hammer. But the ceasefire doesn’t resolve the fundamental cause of the war. While the United States finds the Iranian nuclear program unacceptable, Iran has watched other countries meet a terrible fate after giving up nuclear weapons, a fear that the war just confirme
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