On the menu today: The U.S.-Israeli war against Iran reaches a proposed two-week cease-fire . . . at least on paper; the cease-fire has not stopped Iran from firing missiles and drones at Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates. The list of demands from Iran is an ayatollah’s wish list, but President Trump seems bizarrely enthusiastic about a proposal for the U.S. and Iran to jointly charge a toll fee for ships to pass through the Strait of Hormuz. Read on.
Actions Speak Louder Than Words
One of the first things that jumps out about President Trump and the Iranian government’s statements is that the two sides seem to have a dramatically different sense of what they just agreed upon.
Based on conversations with Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and Field Marshal Asim Munir, of Pakistan, and wherein they requested that I hold off the destructive force being sent tonight to Iran, and subject to the Islamic Republic of Iran agreeing to the COMPLETE, IMMEDIATE, and SAFE OPENING of the Strait of Hormuz, I agree to suspend the bombing and attack of Iran for a period of two weeks. This will be a double sided CEASEFIRE! The reason for doing so is that we have already met and exceeded all Military objectives, and are very far along with a definitive Agreement concerning Longterm PEACE with Iran, and PEACE in the Middle East. We received a 10 point proposal from Iran, and believe it is a workable basis on which to negotiate. Almost all of the various points of past contention have been agreed to between the United States and Iran, but a two week period will allow the Agreement to be finalized and consummated. On behalf of the United States of America, as President, and also representing the Countries of the Middle East, it is an Honor to have this Longterm problem close to resolution. Thank you for your attention to this matter!
Notice the “ten-point proposal from Iran,” which Trump called “a workable basis on which to negotiate.”
According to Tasnim News Agency, affiliated with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, here are the ten points:
1- The US should commit, in principle, to guarantee non-aggression
2- Iran’s continued control of the Strait of Hormuz
3- Iran’s uranium enrichment right should be accepted
4- Lifting of all primary sanctions
5- Lifting of all secondary sanctions
6- Termination of all UN Security Council resolutions
7- Termination of all IAEA Board of Governors resolutions
8- Payment of compensation for damages inflicted on Iran
9- Withdrawal of US combat forces from the region
10- Cessation of the war on all fronts, including against the heroic Islamic resistance in Lebanon
When the Iranian government says, “The heroic Islamic resistance in Lebanon,” they mean Hezbollah.
Your mileage may vary, but my answers to this list of demands would be “depends upon how you define ‘non-aggression’; no; no; heck no; hell no; [bad word] no; [even worse word] no; no [bad word]-ing way; absolutely no [bad word]-ing way; and you can stick this where the sun doesn’t shine.”
These are nine-and-a-half unreasonable and unrealistic demands, and a U.S. concession to just about any of them would represent a dreadful setback to American national security interests. This is an ayatollah’s wish list.
On Tuesday morning, the president was warning “a whole civilization will die tonight.” About twelve hours later, that list of demands was supposedly good enough to persuade the president to back down. (Remember, I was allegedly way out of line for calling Trump “The Most Erratic President in the World” a few months ago.)
If Trump actually agrees to this list of demands, or even a portion of them, yesterday will be remembered as the Mother of All Taco Tuesdays.
You would think the instructions for a cease-fire would be right there in the name, but apparently all over the Middle East, no one got that memo.
This morning, the government of Bahrain reports that some homes were damaged by Iranian drones they shot down, after the cease-fire announcement. The military of the United Arab Emirates said this morning that its air defenses “are actively engaging” incoming missiles and drones from Iran. Israel says that its agreement to cease attacks on Iran did not include an agreement to stop striking targets in Lebanon. So far, this is proving to be a pretty violent cease-fire.
This is why it is probably not such a good idea for the president to jump onto Truth Social shortly after midnight and declare that today is “A big day for World Peace!”
A recurring theme in my writing this year is that the Iranian regime has broken just about every treaty it has ever signed:
- In 2004, Iran’s so-called “moderate” former president, Hassan Rouhani, boasted that he had duped European negotiators while converting yellowcake into uranium hexafluoride at Iran’s Uranium Conversion Facility at Isfahan.
- In 2012, Fereydoon Abbasi, a nuclear scientist who was the head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization, declared in a newspaper interview that “we presented false information sometimes in order to protect our nuclear position and our achievements, as there is no other choice but to mislead foreign intelligence.” He was also quoted as saying that “sometimes we present a weakness that we do not in fact really have, and sometimes we appear to have power without having it.”
- In January 2016, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry announced, “Just yesterday, the foreign minister (of Iran) reported to me that the calandria [core] of the plutonium nuclear reactor is now out and in the next hours it will be filled with concrete and destroyed.” The image of the reactor filled with cement was (rather amateurishly) photoshopped. In January 2019, Ali Akbar Salehi, Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization chief said in a television interview that the calandria core was not filled with cement.
- In March 2025, Trump’s favorite international envoy and negotiator, Steve Witkoff, said on Fox News Channel, “I was in Doha. I met with many of the Arab leaders at the Arab Summit. I thought we had a deal, an acceptable deal. I even — I even thought we had an approval from Hamas, maybe that’s just me getting — getting, you know, duped . . . but I thought we were there and evidently, we weren’t. So, this is on Hamas.”
- In late February, Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi pledged during a TV appearance, “We have limited the range of our missiles below 2,000 kilometers intentionally,” a few weeks before Iran fired a ballistic missile nearly 4,000 kilometers.
Late last month, I warned, “What’s left of the Iranian regime will make promises that they have no intention of keeping, lie at the negotiating table and in television interviews, cheat, steal, block international inspectors — you name it.”
In light of this, it is fair to wonder what the point of negotiating with them is.
A lot, arguably the entire future of the Middle East, depends upon what the Iranians and U.S. actually agree upon in the coming two weeks, and what promises, if any, the Iranians actually keep.
This morning, ABC News’ Jonathan Karl reported that he asked Trump, “if he’s okay with the Iranians charging a toll for all ships that go through the Strait of Hormuz, he told me there may be a Joint US-Iran venture to charge tolls: ‘We’re thinking of doing it as a joint venture. It’s a way of securing it — also securing it from lots of other people. . . . It’s a beautiful thing.’”
Any toll to pass through the Strait of Hormuz would not be “a beautiful thing.” It would represent an unprecedented surrender of freedom of navigation, which the U.S. Navy has fought to preserve and protect since Thomas Jefferson was president. From the days of the Barbary pirates to the Somali pirates and the Houthis, the U.S. and its allies have contended that U.S. ships can sail wherever they want, whenever they want, in international waters, and no state, entity, or force gets to restrict that. The Strait of Hormuz is legally international waters. Neither Iran, nor Oman, nor the United States is legally permitted to charge a fee or threaten force against ships that do not pay a fee. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said the reason the U.S. was destroying the Iranian navy was to “ensure freedom of navigation.” If the U.S. had always been amenable to the Iranian regime charging a fee to all the tankers passing through the Strait of Hormuz . . . why did we just fight this war?
The good news:
- In military terms, the U.S. and Israel have so far won a resounding victory. From almost the beginning of the war, the U.S. and Israel established “air superiority” — the Iranians could not effectively suppress U.S. and Israeli air activities — if not “air supremacy,” where one belligerent is completely unable to confront or interrupt the adversary’s aerial activities. Every once in a great while, the Iranians got lucky and managed to hit a U.S. plane; the U.S. had conducted 13,000 sorties over Iranian territory between February 28 and April 3. If my math is correct, the Kuwaiti air defenses have accidentally shot down more U.S. jets in friendly fire incidents (three) than Iranian air defenses have (two).
- This should calm the world energy markets, at least to a degree. Keep in mind, there are a lot of oil refineries, natural gas facilities, industrial sites, and ports in the Arab states that have been damaged in the past five weeks, and repairing those sites will take time.
- Iran’s actions during the war lengthened its list of enemies and reduced its influence; Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Oman, Bahrain, and other countries are not likely to easily forget or forgive the Iranian military firing missiles and drones into their territory and terrorizing their civilians.
- So far, the only concession that the U.S. has made is a cease-fire that can end at any time, if the U.S. concludes Iran is not keeping its word.
- For a long time, we’ve heard that the U.S. getting “tied down” in a war in the Middle East would make China more likely to invade Taiwan, with Beijing calculating that the U.S. forces were too distracted and U.S. stockpiles of munitions were too low to effectively deter or prevent the invasion. Well, for about five weeks, the U.S. has been engaged in a large-scale air war against Iran and . . . (Jim knocks on wood) so far, neither a Chinese invasion has occurred, nor are there signs that a Chinese invasion is imminent. (The Chinese government did block off a portion of airspace off the coast of Shanghai, from March 27 through May 6, but that area is several hundred miles north of Taiwan.) In fact, for what it is worth, the U.S. intelligence community recently updated its analysis and concluded an imminent invasion is less likely. After what we’ve seen in the past few weeks, if you were a Chinese general, how eager would you be to go fight the Americans?
The bad news:
- The regime of the mullahs is still in power.
- The Iranian mullahs have established a geopolitical victory by demonstrating they can take the Strait of Hormuz and the Persian Gulf hostage, whenever they want, and they only need drones, missiles, and mines to do it. (If you’re the Iranians, do you even want to bother rebuilding your manned air force or navy? You can probably achieve most of your military objectives with missiles, drones, sea drones, and mines.)
- Granting just about anything on the list of Iranian demands would represent a catastrophic geopolitical defeat for the United States, and the president seems bizarrely eager to acquiesce to an Iranian toll to pass through the Strait of Hormuz if he gets a cut.
President Trump seemed to think he could launch the war first and then go back and persuade Americans that it was a good idea. That never happened; polling consistently finds more than half of the American public opposes the war. (The irony of the “MAGA opposes the war” or “MAGA is cracking up” discourse is that self-identified MAGA poll respondents are the only demographic that consistently and widely support the war.)
Trump may well believe that he can agree to a terrible deal with the Iranian regime and convince the American public that it is a great victory. I wouldn’t count on that happening, either.
ADDENDUM: I am not surprised that Virginia’s new governor, Abigail Spanberger, is proving to be considerably less popular than previous governors. When you bait-and-switch voters as severely as she did, you’re guaranteeing a backlash.