The day began with Donald Trump warning a “whole civilization” of 90 million Iranians could die.
It ended with the world — after tense hours fearfully hanging on his every outburst — trying to understand his climbdown.
One extraordinary by-product of the 40-day war is the difficulty in judging the relative credibility of statements not just from Iran’s brutal rulers, but, at times, also from the president of the United States. The fog descended again Tuesday, about 80 minutes before Trump’s deadline to destroy every Iranian bridge and power plant, when he claimed a win on Truth Social and postponed a new escalation.
“A double-sided CEASEFIRE!” Trump proclaimed, adding that in return for his two-week halt to bombing, Iran agreed to the “COMPLETE, IMMEDIATE, and SAFE OPENING of the Strait of Hormuz.”
If hundreds of stranded oil tankers can soon escape the Persian Gulf, cataclysmic damage to the global economy — an issue that has already helped tank Trump’s approval ratings — might be averted. Stock futures immediately spiked on the hopeful news. “It is an Honor to have this Longterm problem close to resolution,” Trump wrote.
That’s not how the Iranians see it. In a 10-point plan described by the country’s Supreme National Security Council, Tehran demanded the right to coordinate all cross-strait traffic to secure “unique economic and geopolitical standing” over a critical oil choke point.
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi also made clear Iran won’t relax any of its leverage even during the two-week ceasefire. “For a period of two weeks, safe passage through the Strait of Hormuz will be possible via coordination with Iran’s Armed Forces and with due consideration of technical limitations,” he wrote on X. Iran’s semi-official Tasnim News Agency, meanwhile, reported that Iran and Oman plan to charge transit fees for ships passing through the strait during the ceasefire.
Trump derided the Supreme National Security Council statement as a fraud and attacked CNN for reporting it.
It will be up to Pakistan, which brokered an agreement for the US and Iran to hold talks starting Friday, to clear this up — if the deal lasts that long. The Islamabad government, which has shrewdly used its friendships in Tehran and Washington, must fashion off-ramps neither Trump nor Iran could find themselves.
The great contradiction lurking in Trump’s claimed triumph
Even the possibility that many lives can be saved — those of Iranians, US service personnel and civilians caught in the crossfire throughout the Middle East — is a blessing. The prospect that the grave global consequences of the war could be mitigated will also alleviate the gloom of six alarming weeks.
But Tuesday’s first details of the diplomacy offer reasons for pessimism.
Any outcome, temporary or permanent, that handed Iran control of the strait would mean the most lasting result of Trump’s war would be leverage it could use to hold the global economy hostage at any time. While the US and Israel say, probably correctly, that their joint attacks have demolished most of Iran’s missile programs and military forces, ending the war with an Iranian chokehold over the strait would be a strategic disaster and a defeat for Trump.
It is too early to tell whether the fearsome joint air assault has loosened the control of the Iranian clerical regime — or just handed power to more ruthless leaders.
As always with Trump, reactions to Tuesday’s ceasefire agreement were conditioned by the highly emotional and polarized emotions that he inspires.
Some critics lampooned another TACO (“Trump always chickens out”) moment. On the surface, the president’s decision is just another where he adopted a maximalist position only to back down in a way that erased his red lines and raised doubts about his credibility. If Iran does indeed get to control access to the strait during the two-week ceasefire, it would underscore perceptions that Trump has no good options in a war that slipped out of his control and that he is desperate to end.
Trump fans, however, will credit the president with snatching yet another win with the shock negotiating tactics of a real estate shark. Conservative media quickly swung into action to spin up a Trumpian triumph. The implication is that Trump’s unorthodox threats drove Iran to the negotiating table.
But the reverberations of a scary day Tuesday went beyond the critical details of who will control the strait, which was open to free navigation before the war.
On one level, Trump was in his element. He was the critical actor in a storm of his own making, spinning the planet around his own axis.
“Only the President knows where things stand and what he will do,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said, as the hours dragged in a countdown to doom.
Yet Trump’s chilling threat, delivered over social media, that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again,” crossed a line that no American president had previously dared or wanted to approach. His qualifier that “I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will” did little to calm nerves.
The comment, which seemed barely believable at first, posed the most acute issues yet about 79-year-old Trump’s temperament and judgment. It might have reflected only the president’s frustration over the war — one of those reflexes that his supporters say should be taken seriously but not literally.
But the words of presidents matter. Even publicly speculating about the mass killing of civilians is dangerous and inappropriate. The threat raised an implicit question for those around Trump and the country: Is this acceptable conduct for the commander in chief of the world’s most lethal superpower?
Notwithstanding his decision not to carry out the escalation, his words suggested the president has crossed moral and behavioral thresholds never approached by his modern predecessors. They underscored how the US, for decades regarded as a pillar of stability, is now — as personified by its president — the world’s most volatile force.
Trump’s threat to Iran sent shock waves through across the political spectrum, drawing condemnation from MAGA personalities and demands from Democrats for the invoking of the 25th Amendment to remove him from office.
Even some Republicans pushed back. “This type of rhetoric is an affront to the ideals our nation has sought to uphold and promote around the world for nearly 250 years,” Sen. Lisa Murkowski, an Alaska Republican, wrote on X. And Wisconsin GOP Sen. Ron Johnson, normally a strong Trump supporter, said the president would lose him if he attacked civilian targets in Iran.
Sen. Jack Reed, the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, warned in a statement that Trump had “become as fanatical as the regime leaders in Tehran.”
The constitutional questions raised by a scary day
Trump’s day on the brink also raised grave constitutional questions exemplified by Leavitt’s statement that “only the President knows … what he will do.”
This is not how the American system of checks and balances and divided power is supposed to work. For many hours, a president who believes he has unrestrained authority was credibly believed to be on the verge of killing millions of foreign civilians in a war for which he sought no congressional authorization; which has been plagued by vague, contradictory rationales; and for which he has no apparent exit strategy.
In years to come, Trump’s vise in Iran may be seen as a cautionary tale of what happens when a president appoints a pliant Cabinet and when a one-party Congress abdicates its duties of oversight.
A traumatic day underscored the perils inherent in the president’s erratic, unorthodox leadership style.
His tendency to personalize every clash, to over-invest US strategic prestige and to adopt extreme positions pushed the latest crisis to a dangerous precipice.
His decision to step back — while welcome, in averting greater human tragedy — left the United States and its global allies that rely on an uninterrupted flow of oil through the Strait of Hormuz in potentially worse positions.
Trump may also have reinforced impressions among adversaries that he’ll always back off and that his severe threats are not serious.
But one day, he may confront an enemy with the capacity to do far more immediate damage to the United States. In such a scenario, careless escalations and mixed signals could prove catastrophic.
