Trump’s last-minute delay: Why he was never going to obliterate Iran in the first place

I’ve been telling anyone who would listen – yes. I can get rather tiresome – that President Donald Trump would not bomb Iran back to the Stone Ages.

Even after he said he would destroy Iran’s civilization and it would never recover, I knew that he would never go through with it. That was the last thing he wanted to do.

So I was confident he would find some kind of last-minute off-ramp.

And, of course, he didn’t want to be seen as backing off his increasingly dire threats.

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I got the White House email at 6:32 Tuesday night. There it was, another delay, after a series of earlier delays. He would give the Iranians two more weeks.

I started posting like crazy, beating television by a couple of minutes, and newspapers by more. But that’s just because my phone happened to be right there. If I’d gone to the fridge for a moment, I would have come back to my laptop and discovered that the world had changed. 

I knew in my gut, having covered Trump for 35 years, that he did not want to go down in history as the man who wiped out an ancient civilization. His heart was never in that. It was bluster as a negotiating tactic. 

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Still, he had boxed himself into a corner. Former allies in conservative media were denouncing him. "This is a brazen pre-admission of genocide against the Iranian people, which would obviously be a war crime. Madness," Piers Morgan declared..

Some Republican lawmakers said he had gone too far. Even the U.S. Catholic Bishops said "the threat of destroying a whole civilization and the intentional targeting of civilian infrastructure cannot be morally justified." 

No American president had ever uttered such words.

So I figured the only card that Trump had left to play was delay. And that’s precisely what he did. At the request of Pakistan, which has been the intermediary in the so-called talks, the president agreed to a pause in the hostilities.    

That is, according to the statement I received, "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…"

It’s a shaky cease-fire, to be sure, with Iran launching missiles at Israel minutes  after it was announced, and Israel saying its ground invasion of Lebanon, after rocket fire from Iranian proxy Hezbollah, isn’t covered.

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By yesterday, in fact, as The AP confirmed, Iran’s state media said it had closed  Hormuz again, citing the Israeli attacks.

Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said in a posting that the Trump administration "must choose between a ceasefire or continued war via Israel, and "it cannot have both."

We learned from New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan that Bibi Netanyahu talked Trump into the war by saying it would be quick and topple the regime. Gen. Dan Caine, the Joint Chiefs chairman, called that "farcical." Marco Rubio said it was BS. JD Vance was against the war.

And that’s a fascinating sidebar. Trump has been insulting Haberman, who published a biography of him in 2022, for no apparent reason. Yet he granted an hourlong Oval Office interview for their forthcoming book, "Regime Change," from which the Times piece was excerpted.

As for the president’s current stance, well, he isn’t being held back by murky details. He told Sky News this was a "complete victory," not just in military terms but "in every other sense as well."

Trump was on the phone with Fox opinion host Laura Ingraham shortly before she came on the air, and she quoted him as being "cautiously optimistic," saying: "It sure looks like Iran blinked."

What, peering through the fog of war, did Trump actually accomplish, other than sending the markets soaring by nearly 3 percent?

On yesterday’s "Fox & Friends," usually a Trump-friendly show, co-host Lawrence Jones said "we have not reached any of these objectives."  

Dismantling nuclear facilities ("that has not happened"), ending uranium enrichment ("they are still enriching"), transferring uranium stockpiles out of Iran ("that hasn’t happened"), accepting international inspections ("they are still not willing to do it"), and suspending the ballistic missile program ("they’re still firing them off"). Jones also criticized Iran for proposals that would never be accepted by the U.S. side.

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Fox anchor Harris Faulkner said yesterday, "this is the least ceasefire-like ceasefire I think that anybody might have anticipated." Fox’s chief foreign correspondent, Trey Yingst, said, "the Iranians don’t appear very serious about this ceasefire agreement." 

And therein lies the rub. The two countries remain far apart. This business about a strategic framework just papers that over in a devil’s-in-the-details sense. Iran is never going to agree to give up its nuclear program, regardless of any presidential pronouncements or Mission Accomplished banners.

The Iranian pitch, apparently not the one seen by Trump, says the U.S. must leave the region, give Iran sole control of the strait, and recognize its right to nuclear enrichment.

Don’t take my word for it. Press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters yesterday that Iran’s 10-point plan was "fundamentally unserious, unacceptable and completely discarded." 

Look, if this somehow all works out, what most people will remember is that Trump made harsh threats that led to a deal in which the Iranian blockade – "Open the F---in’ Strait, you crazy b------s" – was lifted. In other words, his Madman routine worked against the world’s leading terror state, which has been killing Americans, Arabs and its own people for 47 years. 

But things could always fall apart faster than a speeding drone. It’s the Middle East.

No matter what you think of Trump, his war of choice, his apocalyptic rhetoric or his entire presidency, he’s not crazy. He followed a similar path in his tariff crusade, threatening draconian levies before reaching 11th-hour compromises.  As he himself says, he’s a dealmaker. That’s what he does.

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Most media accounts are portraying Trump as caving in or backing down. That’s fair commentary.

But what really happened is that Trump found a way to avoid doing what he was never actually going to do in the first place.