On Iran, Trump blinks first

Less than 24 hours after President Trump accepted the off-ramp proposed by Pakistan’s leaders, granting an “indefinite ceasefire” so Iran’s leaders could “come up with a unified proposal,” the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps attacked three ships in the Strait of Hormuz.

Iran declined to send any negotiators to Islamabad and did not make a single concession to Washington — and still, the president wavered.

With just hours remaining on the existing two-week ceasefire and repeated threats by the president to renew airstrikes — the president blinked. He extended the ceasefire, hoping the regime’s governance would fracture, relying upon his naval blockade to economically break the impasse.

As former Army Chief of Staff Gen. Gordan Sullivan explained in the early 1990s, “hope is not a method.”

The proposal Trump is waiting for Iran to submit was delivered by its Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps on Wednesday: Come and take it. Despite what Trump wants to believe — the “government of Iran is seriously fractured” — its most fanatical armed faction is firmly in control.

On Saturday the Institute for the Study of War reported that its top leaders had “likely secured at least temporary control over not only Iran’s military response in this conflict, but also Iran’s negotiating position.” This signals that “the Iranian political officials currently negotiating with the U.S. do not have the authority to independently determine Iran’s negotiating positions.” The “more pragmatic figures” in the regime, with whom the U.S. had presumably been negotiating previously, have been sidelined.

As we wrote in mid-March, the........

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