With the deadlocked war in Iran about to enter its fourth month, loose comparisons with previous US quagmires in Iraq, Afghanistan and Vietnam are bandied about. When the conflict began, warnings of another “forever war” seemed exaggerated. No longer. As matters stand, the negative international humanitarian, economic and geopolitical fallout from this fiasco looks set to prove more permanently globally damaging than any of those past US-made disasters.

That being the case, an urgent question arises, not least today as reports suggest the US president and his secretary of war are planning to rain more bombs on Iran: who will stop Donald Trump?

Having started something he cannot finish, the US president, egged on by Israel’s warmonger-in-chief, Benjamin Netanyahu, has boxed himself into a corner. Either he resumes the illegal bombing of Iran on an even bigger scale, brazenly threatening war crimes in hopes of forcing surrender; or else he accepts a negotiated compromise that falls embarrassingly short of his initial aims, including eliminating Iran’s nuclear programme, and leaves an angry, more hardline, strategically strengthened regime in power.

Neither choice is attractive – or tenable – for Trump. He and his fanatical sidekick, Pete Hegseth, should know by now that bombing cannot blow away Iran’s defiance and resilience. It is not even militarily effective: 70% of Iran’s missile stockpile reportedly remains intact. In any case, Trump’s threats to break the ceasefire, like his aborted Project Freedom in the strait of Hormuz, are opposed by Gulf states fearful of more retaliatory attacks, by Washington’s allies, Israel excepted – and by most US voters.

A peace deal, with add-ons, that is broadly in line with Barack Obama’s 2015 nuclear pact with Tehran, which Trump foolishly wrecked and is now the most Iran seems willing to offer, would rightly be........

© The Guardian