Iran

War and/or Peace

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Eric Boehm | 4.2.2026 9:30 AM

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(Alex Brandon - via CNP/Polaris/Newscom)

President Donald Trump delivered a prime-time address about the Iran War that could have been a Truth Social post.

The rambling 19-minute speech resembled Trump's frequent social media posts: vaguely belligerent and at times contradictory.

The U.S. will continue to hit Iran "extremely hard over the next two to three weeks," Trump threatened, while simultaneously promising that "discussions are ongoing" to end the war. As he's done in recent weeks, he threatened to target Iran's civilian infrastructure, including power plants, which would be a war crime. However, he seemed to downplay the significance of Iran's nuclear weapons program, which is ostensibly the reason why the war was launched in the first place.

As for the Strait of Hormuz, which Iran now fully controls, Trump simply said "it will just open up naturally."

Well, I guess we can hope so.

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That's what the speech included. Here's what was missing: any indication that the Trump administration has a functional plan to end the war and/or restore freedom of navigation in the Strait of Hormuz. There were no details about what a prospective peace deal might look like (significant, since U.S. intelligence agencies have reportedly determined that the Iranian government is not currently willing to negotiate with Trump,........

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