Michael Barone

Will the U.S.-Iran war turn out to have been the 39-day war, following the locution of the 12-day Israel-Iran war of June 2025?

The markets, as this is written, seem to think so. Asian stock markets were up Wednesday morning after President Donald Trump’s ceasefire announcement and, hours later, so were European markets. U.S. markets had rebounded from initial losses on Tuesday.

The political marketplace was less steady. “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again,” Trump posted on Truth Social at 8:06 a.m. EDT Tuesday.

It didn’t quite happen. At 6:32 p.m. EDT, Trump announced “a double sided CEASEFIRE” on Truth Social. “Subject,” he went on, “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.”

In all these dizzying threats and turnabouts, there are plenteous reverberations of events of the 1970s, which seem to have made a deep impression on the young commercial real-estate developer and reality-TV-star-to-be now in his second term as president.

One memory Trump’s postings evoked was that of Richard Nixon’s “madman” theory. Make adversaries afraid, he confided to aide Bob Haldeman and national security adviser Henry Kissinger, that your president is irrational and angry, that he may be on the brink of wielding America’s awesome power in destructive and unpredictable ways, so that the adversaries, full of dread, will do what he wants.

Of course, Nixon and his aides didn’t tell the public about this at the time. In contrast, Trump proclaims his own negotiating moves in public in ALL CAPS and on his own app.

Against Iran, Trump failed to duplicate his success in abducting Nicolas Maduro and intimidating his chosen successor to refrain from extraterritorial behavior the U.S. opposes. He fell even further short of eliminating a regime bloody from fresh suppression of domestic opponents and scornful of international mores since its seizure and imprisonment for 444 days of U.S. diplomats – an act of war for which it has never apologized.

That regime may not last forever. “Iranian authorities,” writes Reuters’ Phil Stewart, “emerge battered and isolated with an economy in tatters, little prospect of rapid recovery and an impoverished, embittered population.” Their relationship with their affluent Gulf neighbors “has been severed – maybe for decades.”

Trump is apparently sending Vice President JD Vance, who obviously was skeptical of military action against Iran, to Islamabad, Pakistan, to negotiate with Iranians under the auspices of Pakistan’s far-from-entirely-friendly government.

Pakistan’s close ties with an adversarial China are disturbing, and put at risk the increasingly close ties with India that administrations starting with Bill Clinton’s and including Trump’s have successfully pursued. Kissinger used Pakistan to make contact with China. Is China now using Pakistan to make the United States pay Iran for opening the Strait of Hormuz?

“No negotiation is ever final,” a real estate developer once told me, and that seems to hold for Trump. He has done much to diminish Iran’s capacity for evil extraterritorial behavior but nothing that has proved effective yet to fulfill the encouragement he gave in January to its oppressed people. Thirty-nine days: Maybe it should have been fewer, or more.