Tehran's triumph: Iran finally finds Trump's bone spur

Bret Stephens

Iran’s military leaders have greeted the ceasefire agreement with President Donald Trump as a triumph, crowing that “through the imposition of their divine and iron will” they had “humiliated American and Zionist enemies.”

Mostly, they are right.

It is worth remembering that the current regime in Tehran is far less formidable than it was before the Hamas assault on Israel on 7 October 2023. Back then, Iran possessed potent proxies in Syria, Lebanon, the Gaza Strip and Yemen. Its nuclear programme was intact, steadily accumulating large quantities of highly enriched uranium. It maintained a powerful military-industrial base, a weak but functional economy, and a government internationally recognised as legitimate.

Today, much of that is either gone or diminished. Iran is no longer within sprinting distance of a nuclear bomb. Its ally in Syria has been deposed. Hezbollah, Hamas and the Houthis have lost the bulk of their fighting strength. The Iranian rial is among the world’s most worthless currencies. The leadership rules an unhappy population that would almost certainly overthrow it if given the chance. Furthermore, its latest ballistic missile salvo against Israel failed to land a single serious blow, and its blockade of the Strait of Hormuz strained, but did not strangle, global energy markets.

These are real achievements against an ambitious, hostile regime. Yet the outcome of war rarely rests on a tally of relative strength; it is a contest of wills. In that contest, the hard men of Tehran appear to have scored a decisive victory over the vain man of Washington.

I supported this conflict from the outset, hoping to see Trump carry it through to a decisive result: if not regime change, then at least a deal forcing Iran to relinquish its enrichment capabilities and guarantee unfettered access to the strait. Those goals were well within the president’s reach, particularly if he had continued to strike Iran’s military-industrial infrastructure until it agreed to terms, rather than conducting negotiations after the fighting had largely stopped.

But Trump blinked after the regime failed to instantly crumble, and energy prices shot up. He effectively abandoned the war he started after less than six weeks of sustained combat — a conflict in which the US lost fewer service members than in the 1983 invasion of Grenada. He compounded the error with a comical succession of military threats followed by last-minute climb-downs, each signalling indecision to Iranian adversaries practised in the study of weakness. Tehran took the measure of Trump’s courage and found a bone spur.

All this seems odd for a president who loudly complained that the US had not “fought to win” a war since 1945, demanded “unconditional surrender” from Iran and repeatedly lambasted his predecessor for the humiliating exit from Afghanistan. Then again, it is entirely consistent for a leader whose political essence relies on the abandonment of his own stated principles.

Although the details of the deal remain murky — a telling indicator of its shoddiness, since the administration would otherwise trumpet the terms — it is clear Trump has betrayed his promise to the Iranian people. After they were massacred in January to quell anti-government protests, he assured them that “help is on its way.” As with past approaches to Venezuela, China and Russia, this administration’s message to oppressed people everywhere is that their rights come last.

Trump is also on his way to betraying Israel, our principal ally in this fight, by pushing Jerusalem to stand down against Hezbollah. This hands Tehran the victory of creating a diplomatic linkage between Lebanon and Hormuz. If Iran is now permitted to extract a service fee for ships transiting the strait, Trump will have also betrayed our allies in the Persian Gulf by granting Iran financial and strategic leverage to which it has no right.

The worst betrayal, however, is of the Americans who supported the war — including Trump’s MAGA base — believing that Iran posed an increasingly intolerable threat to national security. This ceasefire neither ends nor eases that threat; it hardens it. It removes the primary point of US leverage — the naval blockade of Iranian ports — before any real negotiation over its nuclear programme begins, an exercise the Iranians will surely drag out until Trump leaves office.

This pretence of peace is an act of geopolitical self-harm that will haunt Washington's global standing for years to come.