Trump Takes the Off-Ramp From the Israeli-Iranian War
War with Iran was a risky, destructive gamble. But the worst outcome has been avoided, for now.
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 confirmed. And Israel, which believes it is a much broader and more existential struggle with Iran, now sees that it can pull the U.S. directly into war.
The Iranian government has already promised to rebuild its nuclear program, despite Trump's assertion that it will not. Unlike before, when the program was under international supervision, the new Iranian nuclear facilities will be more secretive and better hardened against attack. On Tuesday, the Iranian parliament passed a bill to suspend oversight by the United Nations' International Atomic Energy Agency, which had been the outside world's main source of information on Iranian nuclear work.
The obvious solution is a new deal over the nuclear program, which Trump had been trying to broker before the war. And Operation Midnight Hammer probably did give Trump some additional leverage in talks. But the fact that the U.S. used diplomatic signals as a "headfake" to prepare for an attack on Iran, and the fact that one of Israel's first targets was the chief Iranian negotiator, means that it will take a lot of trust-building from the American side now.
Meanwhile, Israeli leaders may look to replicate their "mowing the lawn" or "war between the wars" model, which calls for a steady stream of raids aimed at keeping the enemy weak. After signing a ceasefire in Lebanon in November 2024, the Israeli military has continued to attack Lebanon on an almost daily basis to prevent the militia Hezbollah from rearming. Israeli media have speculated about a similar outcome for Iran.
"Iran will not have to sign a nuclear agreement that amounts to surrender, but it will know that any nuclear component that moves there, even for a second, any centrifuge that starts spinning, any scientist who touches on a subject that might be related to weapons, will immediately be intercepted by a missile from the F-35, an attack that will be like a walk in the park for the Air Force pilots," the newspaper Yedioth Ahonroth noted.
Unlike the wars in Lebanon or the Palestinian territories, any Israeli campaign against Iran requires heavy American lifting, as the past week has demonstrated. So far, Trump has managed to keep both America First doves and neoconservative hawks in his coalition happy by selling Operation Midnight Hammer as a one-off success. Israeli attempts to keep fighting Iran will require Trump to either upset the America Firsters by committing to an indefinite war or upset the neoconservatives by saying no to Israel.
Of course, Trump may be able to thread the needle, coming to a lasting deal with Iran over its nuclear program and its conflict with Israel. (And as a feather in his cap, he can restore the Israeli-Palestinian ceasefire that he had allowed to collapse.) The Israeli-Iranian ceasefire is a necessary but not sufficient step on the way there.
