“In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies,” said Winston Churchill. The truth inside Donald Trump’s tornado of piffle is that he wants to get out of the mess he created. All the other reasons he gives — from regime overthrow to regime alteration — are noise. At this point, were Iran to open the Strait of Hormuz in exchange for being allowed to develop nuclear weapons, nobody could be sure Trump would turn it down. If Iran made him the inaugural winner of the Cyrus the Great peace prize, those odds would improve.
Here is what Trump expected when he started bombing Iran: its regime would collapse or unconditionally surrender within 72 hours. That was Plan A. Plan B did not exist, which means Trump is scrambling to get back to what existed before Plan A. His war aim is the status quo ante. Had Plan B existed, Trump would have readied allies, put US minesweepers and Marines in place, built up oil reserves and flooded the Gulf states with interceptors. “Nobody was even thinking about it,” he said on Iran lashing out at other Gulf states. Everybody was expecting Iran’s response except him. Indeed, Gulf rulers directly warned him against it before February 28. Nor does it matter how carefully the deep state laid out the risks. What Trump will not hear did not exist.
He has now shifted into the self-cancelling carrot and stick phase of the war. Iran is acting impervious to both. One moment, Trump is threatening “an amount of strength and power that Iran has never seen or witnessed before”. Then, roughly 36 hours later, he declares that the US and Iran have been having “very good and productive conversations”. Few took the latter on trust. It is a strange situation where the world must await a statement from Iran to check whether there was any truth to what a US president said. Iran replied that no talks had taken place. Who were we to believe?