I guess we’re going to find out: President Trump said he was extending a cease-fire with Iran on Tuesday just hours before it was set to expire. The announcement came after Vice President JD Vance’s trip to Pakistan for a second round of peace negotiations was put on hold because, according to a U.S. official, Tehran failed to respond to American positions. The president made the announcement on Truth Social.
He said he had received a request from Pakistan, which is trying to mediate an end to the war, to hold off any attacks. Mr. Trump said a cease-fire would stay in effect until Iran’s “leaders and representatives can come up with a unified proposal.” The Iranians aren’t stupid, or at least not nearly as stupid as their adversary here, so they recognize that the longer this goes on the worse it will get for Trump.
They have very little incentive to negotiate, especially given that nothing Trump says means anything. The one tiny glimmer of rational self-interest here may be that Trump is sending the hair apparent on a diplomatic suicide mission, in order to derail his ambitions. But that’s probably just more sanewashing of this utterly absurd and insane situaiton.
The intelligent play here would be to cut losses, declare an agreement that leaves the Iranian theocrats in a much stronger position than they were in before the war to be the greatest act of statesmanship in world or possibly galactic history, and then get back to picking out the curtains for the White House renovations, and fencing everything that’s been stolen from the Kennedy center. So obviously that’s not going to happen. I am looking forward with a certain morbid curiosity to Bret Stephens’s next explanation of how all this means that the war is going well for America and the world.
President Donald Trump claimed Tuesday it would’ve taken him just five months to end a war he refused to fight in. . . “And I just looked at a little chart, World War I, four years and three months. World War II, six years.
Korean War, three years. Vietnam, 19 years. Iraq, eight years. I’m five months.
OK, five months,” Trump said. “I would have won Vietnam very quickly. I would have, if I were president, I would have won Iraq in the same amount of time that we won because, essentially, we won here.” The U.S. formal involvement in the Vietnam War wasn’t actually 19 years long—it was more like eight.
But how can one expect Trump to know something like that, when he wasn’t actually there? The president, son of a rich real estate mogul, evaded the military draft five times. And anyway, Trump clearly has loose definitions for what actually constitutes a war. The president seems to believe war starts and ends when he says so, and then starts again and ends again, and so on ad infinitum.