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Just 90 minutes before his 8 p.m. ET deadline Tuesday, President Donald Trump called off Armageddon, at least for two weeks—his customary amount of time to delay harsh actions that he has threatened but, it turns out, doesn’t really want to take.

Both Trump and the leaders of Iran—which he had threatened to destroy as a civilization if it didn’t open the Strait of Hormuz—claimed victory in the war, which had raged on for more than five weeks before the announcement last night of a two-week ceasefire.

Trump and his supporters claim that his relentless military pressure and his threat to bomb the country “back to the Stone Age” is what compelled Iran to give in. The Iranians are claiming that they didn’t give in at all—that their regime is intact, despite the fact that U.S. bombs and missiles struck 13,000 Iranian targets and that Israeli airstrikes killed the top echelon of their leaders.

Certainly, Iran emerges from this war gravely wounded, but far from extinguished as a regional power. And indeed, a 10-point plan that its leaders proposed, and that Trump accepted as grounds for a ceasefire and the basis of negotiations, gives Iran almost every advantage.

The plan, which Pakistan’s leaders presented to Trump on Iran’s behalf, opens up the Strait of Hormuz to commercial traffic—but only in coordination with the Iranian military. In short, it proposes to give Iran control over the strait, which it did not have before the war began.

The plan also demands that the U.S. and other Western countries drop all economic sanctions against Iran, that Iran be allowed to enrich uranium (as enshrined, to some extent, as a “right,” by the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty), that the ceasefire extend to Israel’s attacks on Lebanon, and that the U.S. withdraw from all its military bases in the Middle East. If taken literally, this would include some of the largest air and naval bases that the United States holds in the world.

The fact that Trump accepted this list as a starting point for negotiations, and as good enough reason for dropping his threat to destroy Iran, tells Iranians (and everybody else in the world) that his threat wasn’t serious to begin with. He clearly realized, as the countdown clock clicked on, that he had overstepped and was eager, even desperate, for an off-ramp.

In the end, Trump stopped the war (for now, anyway) without achieving any of the goals that he has cited, at various times, as rationales for going to war.

Iran has not agreed to end its nuclear program—quite the contrary. (It is also believed to have almost 1,000 pounds of highly........

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