Launching what was initially described as “a pre-emptive” campaign against Iran on February 28, the United States and Israel set out a series of highly ambitious and ultimately vital goals. When US President Donald Trump announced a ceasefire and declared victory 39 days later, amid significant tactical success but inadequate strategic planning, none of them had been definitively achieved.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu encouraged an evidently amenable Trump to go to war in order to close the vicious and rapacious regime’s path to nuclear weapons, destroy its ballistic missile capabilities, dismantle its proxies and thwart its global terror activities. And the president has indicated that he remains committed to achieving all of this in a multi-point “long-term” peace deal that is now supposed to be negotiated.

But, for now, while Iran’s nuclear “industrial base” has been further degraded, the regime retains its buried stockpile of highly enriched uranium. It may, if anything, be more inclined to attempt a breakout to the bomb, amid a heightened determination to destroy Israel and to achieve broader invulnerability to future attack.

Similarly, while its ballistic missile capabilities, including all the necessary manufacturing elements, have been greatly degraded — Netanyahu and US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth have both said Iran is not capable of building more missiles at present — the regime proved able to keep firing throughout the war, at Israel and Gulf neighbors, including at longer ranges and with diversely deadly warheads.

Its Hezbollah proxy in Lebanon battered the Israeli north relentlessly, proving far more potent than residents had been given to understand after the IDF’s successes in 2024. Hamas stayed out of the conflict, quietly continuing its Gaza revival, with Israel’s main attention focused elsewhere.

Both Trump and Netanyahu also set a declared goal of creating the climate in which the Iranian public would be able to rise up and oust the regime. As Trump acknowledged this week, however, it remained too dangerous for people to do; they knew they would be shot dead, like tens of thousands before them.

Yet, the president, losing support at home and having underestimated the global energy crisis Iran could create by exercising control over the Strait of Hormuz, has declared that the old regime is gone and that he has been negotiating with new, different Iranian leaders. And Netanyahu, leading an Israel that has been hemorrhaging support and empathy most everywhere, including the United States, has no alternative but to warily fall into line.

‘Everyone’ wanted a ceasefire, Trump says. Well, he certainly did

‘Everyone’ wanted a ceasefire, Trump says. Well, he certainly did

Trump’s semantic games about old and new regimes may represent the biggest danger of this current, fateful moment. The fighting is at a fragile halt, with the Islamic Republic still oppressing its people and still seeking to destroy Israel, emboldened to have survived an assault led by the world’s mightiest military power, and with no binding agreements in place to ensure that it cannot reconstitute what it has lost.

And yet the US president is telling the world, and himself, that he is dealing with “reasonable” people — indeed that he has received “a 10-point proposal from them,” believes it to be “a workable basis on which to negotiate,” and expects that a two-week ceasefire period “will allow the agreement to be finalized and consummated.”

In another post late on Tuesday night, Trump declared that the ceasefire marks “A big day for World Peace! Iran wants it to happen, they’ve had enough! Likewise, so has everyone else!”

It’s the “everyone” in that post that’s most troubling, and most revealing.

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1 Mojtaba Khamenei reportedly in ‘severe’ condition, unable to govern Iran

2 Op-edTrump’s ‘new, reasonable’ Iran is neither new nor reasonable, and he knows it

3 US, IDF strikes hit Iranian rail and Kharg Island; Israel faces ongoing missile attacks

4 Trump: ‘A whole civilization will die tonight’ if ultimatum for Iran to open Hormuz expires

5 IDF admits Tehran synagogue was ‘collateral damage’ in strike on Iran commander

6 Trump: US to ‘suspend bombing’ of Iran for 2 weeks while talks held on ‘longterm peace’ deal

7 Long Island town must pay $19m for blocking construction of Chabad synagogue

8 US Jewish groups denounce Trump’s threat that a ‘whole civilization will die’ in Iran

2026 US-Israel war with Iran

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