As the final hours approached Donald Trump’s 8pm EST deadline on Tuesday (April 7) for Iran to submit to his terms, the US president issued a series of increasingly apocalyptic threats. “An entire civilization will die tonight, never to return,” he said has written on Social Truth that morning, declaring it “one of the most important moments in the long and complex history of the World.”
A little over two hours later, Trump CALLED Fox News anchor Bret Baier to reiterate that “8 p.m. is happening,” vowing to launch “an attack they haven’t seen.” When asked by a reporter whether the president was considering a nuclear attack on Iran, the White House press office RECALLING he on Trump’s previous social media post and remarked: “Only the President knows where things stand and what he’s going to do.”
With just under four hours left on the clock, and much of the commentary on X apparently probing the chain of command for a US nuclear attack — it turns out that the president has the sole authority to order a strike — the Pakistani prime minister publicly called on Trump to extend his deadline for destroying Iran by two weeks. Shehbaz Sharif claimed that diplomatic efforts were “progressing steadily, robustly and robustly”, calling on Tehran to allow the resumption of shipping through the Strait of Hormuz during the same period as a goodwill gesture.
This gave both sides an exit option if they chose to take it. 90 minutes before the deadline, Trump duly tweeted that he would “curb the destructive force being sent into Iran tonight” for a period of two weeks, provided Tehran agreed to the “FULL, IMMEDIATE and SECURE OPENING of the Strait of Hormuz.” Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi then announced that Iran had agreed to Pakistan’s proposal and would provide “safe passage” through the strait “through coordination with the Iranian Armed Forces”. (It was not clear how many ships Iranian officials intended to transit, and whether they would continue with an earlier demand that ships pay a transit fee, said to be $2 million.)
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The price of oil immediately began to fall, markets can be expected to rise and both sides are sure to claim a decisive victory, although difficult negotiations and the prospect of a return to war at any moment still lie ahead. At the time of writing, shortly after the ceasefire was announced, air raid sirens were said to be sounding in Israel, accompanied by warnings of an incoming Iranian ballistic missile, although there were no subsequent reports of any damage. Kuwait also said its military was responding to missile and drone attacks, although it was possible the cease-fire order had not yet filtered through to all Iranian units. In a statement, Iran’s National Security Council warned: “Our fingers are on the trigger and if the enemy wavers even a little, we will respond with force.”
At best, what has been achieved is a tentative return to the status quo ante at the cost of massive destruction in Iran, thousands of lives across the Middle East, along with 13 US military personnel, serious depletion of the US missile stockpile, and severe damage to US alliances, many of which were already in dire straits before this war. Largely sidelined at his April 6 press conference, which was dominated by the extraordinary rescue of a US airliner that crashed over Iran and Trump’s continued threats against Iran, he derided NATO as a “paper tiger” and reiterated that “we want Greenland.”
Key issues that Trump has previously invoked to justify this war, such as Iran’s refusal to give up its right to enrich uranium, its ballistic missile arsenal, support for proxies across the region and the ability to threaten its Gulf neighbors, remain unresolved. If the fighting stops along current lines, the Iranian regime will retain the knowledge and likely the ability to restart its nuclear program, perhaps now with an even greater strong urge to follow the bomb. Iran’s stockpile of highly enriched uranium remains undiscovered, although Trump has maintained that it is buried deep beneath the compound in Isfahan that the US bombed last June and is under constant surveillance, apparently by satellite, to thwart any efforts to recover the material. Likewise, much of Iran’s missile and drone arsenal, and its ability to target its neighbors, remains intact.
Despite Trump’s claims that he has achieved “Complete and Total Regime Change” in Iran and is now negotiating with “different, smarter and less radicalized minds”, the same regime remains in power. If anything, even more hard-line officials are now in charge. They have continued to execute political prisoners and suppress internal dissent throughout this war, and will now boast of their success in confronting the most powerful military in the world. The fatwa, or religious decree, the late Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei issued in 2003 prohibiting the pursuit of nuclear weapons apparently died with him at the start of this war.
The surviving regime also has a new, perhaps far more effective form of leverage than its nuclear program in the form of its proven ability to effectively close the Strait of Hormuz, holding 20 percent of the world’s oil supply hostage, and with it, the global economy. Trump can point to the reopening of the strait — if indeed it remains open — as supposed evidence of America “winning” under his leadership, but the strait was wide open before he launched this war. The struggle to return to the conditions that existed before this conflict, or worse, hardly constitutes a great victory.
Even some of the president’s staunchest supporters are questioning his conduct during this conflict, particularly his clear threats to target civilian infrastructure such as power plants, which would almost certainly constitute a war crime, and to destroy an “entire civilization,” which would appear to comply with the United Nations. definitions of genocide.
While some will insist that Trump is “executing a sophisticated ‘crazy’ strategy in a complex 5-D chess game.” has written Oren Cass, a conservative commentator and chief economist at the American Compass think tank, “now rather than later seems the time to say that the actions he is proposing would be a disaster for our country, both strategically and morally, which makes the remarks themselves a terrible mistake.” In a post on X in the hours before the cease-fire was announced on April 7, Cass noted that, “if these are empty threats that we all know he won’t carry out, then they are ineffective threats (the Iranians are also on X!), just making the president and our nation look stupid.” Regardless of whether those threats were serious or not, he continued, “we have to be willing to say: This is wrong.”
“This is evil and madness,” has written former Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor-Greene, who fell out with Trump last year over his handling of the Epstein files. She called for the 25th amendment to be invoked, which allows the vice president along with a majority of the cabinet to declare the president unfit to perform their duties and begin a process to remove him from office.
On the other hand, Lindsay Graham, a Republican senator from South Carolina who has long been an ardent supporter of military action against, seemed unable to contain his disappointment that Trump appeared to be backing down. “We must remember that the Strait of Hormuz was attacked by Iran after the start of the war, destroying freedom of navigation. has written in response to Trump’s tweet announcing the cease-fire, asking the president to ensure that the Iranian regime “is not rewarded for this hostile act against the world.” He also demanded that “every ounce and about 900 pounds of highly enriched uranium” believed to still be in the country should be “controlled by the U.S. and removed from Iran to prevent them in the future from having a dirty bomb or going back into the enrichment business.” As he concluded, sounding clearly skeptical: “Time will tell.”
(Further reading: The end of the American empire)
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