If you don’t like the Trump administration’s stance on Iran, just wait a few minutes, it will change.
If you’re an Iran hawk, you had reason for some optimism when the U.S. war against Iran — don’t be like Putin and use the euphemism of a “military operation”; when you’re executing 12,000 combat sorties against targets, it’s a war — started back on February 28.
Finally, there was a U.S. president who seemed to grasp that there was no prospect for a lasting peaceful coexistence with a regime that uses “Death to America” as a slogan, mantra, and philosophy. A president who seemed to understand that Iran had broken just about every treaty it had ever signed. A commander who recognized that the only way to eliminate the long-term threat to the U.S., its interests, and our allies was to eliminate the regime itself. And this was a president who had been a scathing critic of the Obama administration’s Iran deal, calling it “one of the worst deals ever made.”
But in the past month, Trump’s reflexive desire to be a “dealmaker” has led to this frustrating repeated pattern of issuing some near-apocalyptic threat, followed by a sudden declaration that some diplomatic breakthrough had forestalled the execution of that threat. The president keeps sending the likes of his son-in-law Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff for talks that never seem to go anywhere.
Yesterday evening, Trump announced on Truth Social that “Project Freedom (The Movement of Ships through the Strait of Hormuz) will be paused for a short period of time” at the request of the government of Pakistan, among other countries. It’s strange enough to see Pakistan — the former residence of Osama bin Laden, ruled by a government long accused of secretly backing Taliban insurgents in next-door Afghanistan — getting a chance to play peacemaker in the Middle East; it’s even more bizarre to see an American president altering its policies, even temporarily, in response to requests from the Pakistani government.
Then this morning Trump added that the Strait of Hormuz could soon be “OPEN TO ALL.” Or “the bombing starts, and it will be, sadly, at a much higher level and intensity than it was before.”
Earlier this week, the U.S. military destroyed six Iranian small boats and intercepted Iranian cruise missiles and drones fired by Tehran. Also, according to the administration, the cease-fire is still in effect, and they see no contradiction between those sentences.
Because the state of the war/cease-fire always seems to be changing, there’s a futility to trying to get a handle on it; like the old joke about the weather, if you don’t like it, just wait a few minutes, it will change. We may not get the full TACO (Trump always chickens out), but it increasingly seems like Trump wants to reach a deal with a regime that he had previously accurately identified as an immutable, irredeemable, hardline enemy of the United States, a deal that probably isn’t going to look all that different from the Obama deal that Trump previously castigated. It’s getting harder and harder for Iran hawks to feel like this is going to end with a satisfactory victory.