Iran

Donald Trump is trying to wriggle out of his self imposed Strait-jacket. After a renewed round of bombing Iran and bluster about seizing Kharg Island, he has now announced that is all over, including a planned attack tonight: “Based on the fact that discussions with the Islamic Republic of Iran have been brought to the highest level of Iranian leadership and approved, I have, as President of the United States of America, cancelled the scheduled strikes and bombings against Iran this evening.” Is it back to the future again? Or are hostilities really about to cease? Any cessation will incense the war hawks in Washington who helped propel Trump into this misbegotten conflict in the first place.

Today marks a hundred days since America and Israel began launching strikes on Iran on February 28. The very next day, Donald Trump told the Atlantic that Iran’s leaders "want to talk," saying they should have made a deal sooner and that "they played too cute." Three days after Trump said this, Iran announced that the Strait of Hormuz was closed. Since then, we have been told dozens of times that we are on the brink of a lasting deal between Iran and America, often in the President’s statements on Truth Social. At the end of last month, Axios reported that US and Iranian negotiators had reached an agreement on a 60-day memorandum which would reopen the Strait, which simply needed Trump’s sign off.

Donald Trump was for the Iran war before he was against it. His latest post on social media about the conflict indicated that he is once more calling off a sweeping military action, this time at the behest of his Gulf allies who are apparently quaking at the thought of a renewed conflict.

Robert Kagan has long had a knack for capturing public attention with bold pronouncements about American foreign policy. In 1996, together with William Kristol, he published an essay in Foreign Affairs called “Toward A Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy” that chided the Clinton administration for insufficient martial vigor and argued that the Pentagon budget should be doubled. As a charter member of the Project for the New American Century and a regular contributor to the Weekly Standard, Kagan became an eloquent champion of the George W. Bush administration’s Iraq war.