frozen out of the negotiations<\/a> and fearful they are being forced by Mr. Trump into a cease-fire with Hezbollah that will interfere with their ability to rip apart the terror group. Historians will grapple for years about the lessons of a conflict in which the United States spent tens of billions of dollars, with 13 Americans and more than 3,000 Iranians reported to have been killed.<\/p>\nBut it was Mr. Trump himself who offered what may be the most cleareyed answer about why he needed to end this war so fast. He didn\u2019t want comparisons to Herbert Hoover, he told reporters at the Hotel Royal in \u00c9vian-les-Bains, on the shores of Lake Geneva, on Wednesday.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe was always the one I didn\u2019t want to be,\u201d Mr. Trump said of the 31st president, who presided over the market crash that ushered in the Great Depression. \u201cI didn\u2019t want to see economic catastrophe.\u201d Later he noted that if the war continued, the world would have begun to run out of oil stockpiles.<\/p>\n
That combination \u2014 economic chaos and disrupted oil markets \u2014 is exactly what the Iranians viewed from the opening days of the war as their most potent weapon. They executed on that vision with precision, closing the strait and blowing up petrochemical facilities, desalination plants, hotels and air bases across the Gulf. And by the president\u2019s own testimony, it worked.<\/p>\n
If that was Phase 1 of Iran\u2019s strategy, history suggests Phase 2 may be one of delay and more delay. In past negotiations, the Iranians refined the art of arguing over every paragraph, throwing in new obstacles to inspections or reinterpreting the meaning of \u201cnuclear research\u201d to embrace continued uranium enrichment. Few were more skilled at this process, former American negotiators say, than Abbas Araghchi, the Iranian foreign minister, and a veteran of past talks.<\/p>\n
And Mr. Trump, eager to move on, seems to be paving the way for a long, slow process. On Tuesday, he said he wasn\u2019t especially concerned with getting Iran\u2019s nuclear fuel \u2014 now buried under the rubble of last year\u2019s American air attacks \u2014 out of the country. On Wednesday, he acknowledged the talks would probably go beyond 60 days.<\/p>\n
It is too early to say whether Mr. Trump will ultimately be able to claim more accomplishments. If, in the next stage of negotiations, he manages to get the Iranians to ship their stockpiles of nuclear fuel out of the country (as President Obama did in 2015) and cease all enrichment activity for nearly two decades (which Mr. Obama failed to accomplish), then he may be able claim some long-term victory.<\/p>\n
If the war turns out to have destabilized the Iranian leadership and triggered protests and an uprising, as Mr. Trump called for at the beginning of the conflict, he could well claim credit.<\/p>\n
But for now it looks like the opposite is taking place. If anything, Mr. Trump has propped up the new leadership, ostensibly run by the new supreme leader, the injured and out-of-sight Mojtaba Khamenei, the son of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was killed in the opening strike of the war.<\/p>\n
The Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, which has overseen the nuclear program for years, seems firmly in control, though a senior administration official argued to reporters several days ago that by bringing about a peace, Mr. Trump is now forcing the elite military unit to face the travails of governing.<\/p>\n
Senior members of the Obama administration, having absorbed years of critiques from Mr. Trump about the shortcomings and loopholes in the agreement struck in 2015, saw their moment to exact a measure of retribution.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe only \u2018achievement\u2019 of the ceasefire is the likely re-opening the Strait of Hormuz \u2014 which was open before the war started,\u201d former Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken wrote online on Wednesday. \u201cAnd we will apparently pay Iran to do so, in the form of waivers for the export of Iranian crude oil. Iran has now demonstrated the capacity to stop or slow the passage of oil, natural gas, fertilizer and other critical products upon which so much of the world depend.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mr. Blinken, an architect of the 2015 accord, concluded: \u201cGoing forward, it will almost certainly find ways to collect \u2018fees\u2019 for safe passage that will help entrench the regime.\u201d<\/p>\n
While some Republicans expressed cautious optimism that Mr. Trump\u2019s peace-through-negotiation strategy may yet work, a good number of Iran hard-liners and America First adherents could not bring themselves to repeat the talking points in support of the accord that were being emailed by members of the administration. Among the most outspoken were those protected by impending retirement.<\/p>\n
\u201cReagan is rolling over in his grave,\u201d Senator Bill Cassidy, a Louisiana Republican who lost a primary last month after Mr. Trump targeted him for defeat, wrote on social media. He said that Iran\u2019s nuclear ambitions \u201cwere not curbed\u201d and that the war had taught the Iranians that they had more leverage over the Strait of Hormuz and the world economy than they knew. Mr. Cassidy termed the war \u201cthe worst foreign policy blunder in decades.\u201d<\/p>\n
But the bigger risk may be this one: When Iran\u2019s leaders begin to clear the rubble left by 40 days of bombing, and think about how to spend the billions in oil revenue that will soon resume, they may well question whether they had the right nuclear strategy.<\/p>\n
For more than two decades Iran walked right up to the edge of building a nuclear bomb, but never stepped over the line, figuring that a \u201cthreshold\u201d capability was all it needed to deter the United States and Israel from attacking. That enabled it to stay in the nonproliferation treaty, and insist that it had only peaceful intentions, with the security of knowing that in months it could produce a weapon. The result was that it was bombed in June 2025 and attacked again in February 2026.<\/p>\n
North Korea, in contrast, raced for the bomb, setting off its first successful nuclear test in 2006, and now has an arsenal of 60 or more weapons, according to U.S. intelligence agencies. It has escaped no nuclear strategist that these days, Mr. Trump isn\u2019t issuing threats to North Korea.<\/p>\n
On Sunday, when Mr. Trump called The Times, this reporter asked him whether Iran might now follow the North Korean model. \u201cHe\u2019s got serious nuclear weapons,\u201d Mr. Trump said of Kim Jong-un, whom he threatened with annihilation during the first Trump term, then met three times in a fruitless effort to convince him to disarm. \u201cBut that should not have been allowed,\u201d he said, asking whether North Korea got the bomb under President Clinton or President Obama. (It made its first test under President George W. Bush.)<\/p>\n
But Mr. Trump evaded the question of whether his decision to attack Iran could ultimately drive it to follow North Korea\u2019s model. And he insisted his deal would stop Iran, saying Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu should thank him for keeping Israel from nuclear annihilation.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhatever it takes,\u201d he said. \u201cForty-seven years,\u201d he said, referring to the 1979 Iranian revolution, \u201cnobody was able to do it. And we did it. We did it the right way.\u201d<\/p>\n
History may prove him right, but it is far too premature to make that claim. Maybe even he knows that, based on his statements on Wednesday morning. If the accord didn\u2019t stick, he had a plan, he insisted. He would \u201cgo back to bombing.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It was less than 15 weeks ago when President Trump, at the height of his bravado about how…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":165622,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[3],"tags":[24408,4064,30793,34,90,29199,2246,981,269,7361,1418,12619,101,392,4062,25779],"class_list":["post-165621","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-iran","tag-barack","tag-donald-j","tag-economic-conditions-and-trends","tag-iran","tag-khamenei","tag-mojtaba-1969","tag-north-korea","tag-nuclear-energy","tag-nuclear-weapons","tag-obama","tag-oil-petroleum-and-gasoline","tag-peace-process","tag-strait-of-hormuz","tag-trump","tag-united-states-international-relations","tag-united-states-politics-and-government"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@iran\/116768668687807508","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/165621","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=165621"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/165621\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/165622"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=165621"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=165621"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=165621"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}