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Why Ending the Iran War May Be a Never-Ending Story

As Trump’s “excursion” veers into quagmire territory, he may just try to walk away amid a host of new distractions.

President Donald Trump at an April press conference about the war in Iran.

Beyond the bubble of hardened MAGA cultists and a smattering of elite pundits, the joint American-Israeli war on Iran announced by a somnolent President Trump on February 28 is widely regarded as a pointless fiasco that is doing incalculable and growing damage to the global economy. The fact that the president once again unilaterally extended the ceasefire with Iran last week means that he still has no credible ideas about how to get traffic moving through the Strait of Hormuz. He’s similarly flummoxed when it comes to imposing America’s settlement terms on an emboldened regime in Tehran—despite his constant insistence that the war has resulted in an unprecedented, monumental American victory.

Regardless of if or when Trump’s crack negotiating team featuring zero Iran experts returns to Islamabad to meet with Tehran’s delegation, the status quo in the Strait of Hormuz is untenable. Oil prices are creeping up again after dropping on President Trump’s flurry of hallucinatory statements on April 17 proclaiming that the war would be wrapping up soon. The end was inevitably near, Trump insisted, because Iran had agreed to open the Strait of Hormuz, forgo the ability to enrich uranium forever and relinquish its stockpile of what the president with almost child-like wonder calls “nuclear dust.”

Unsurprisingly, none of those claims turned out to be remotely true, leaving observers once again to conclude that the president’s primary audience for these spasms of optimistic wish-casting is the menagerie of Wall Street grifters and gamblers who cause the S&P 500 line to jolt upward, in total defiance of reality.

But what if Trump simply tried to slink away and change the subject without any definitive end to the war, leaving the situation in a slightly altered version of the status quo? The war’s odd, liminal status and Saturday night’s security incident at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner have already succeeded in pushing the conflict out of the headlines.

Trump seems to be stumbling toward a kind of endless steady state, in which the ceasefire either gets repeatedly extended into the future like a continuing budget resolution, or the parties agree to stop shooting through the end of the midterm elections. This plunge into total diplomatic indeterminacy—call it Schrödinger’s ceasefire—is reminiscent of when Trump returned completely empty-handed from his June 2018 summit with Kim Jong Un after a year of stoking panic about the country’s nuclear weapons and abruptly declared that “there is no longer a nuclear threat from........

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