Will the U.S.-Iran war turn out to have been the 39-day war, following the locution of the 12-day Israel-Iran war of June 2025?

The markets, as this is written, seem to think so. Asian stock markets were up Wednesday morning after President Donald Trump's ceasefire announcement and, hours later, so were European markets. U.S. markets had rebounded from initial losses on Tuesday.

The political marketplace was less steady. "A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again," Trump posted on Truth Social at 8:06 a.m. EDT Tuesday. "I don't want that to happen," he reassured readers, "but it probably will."

It didn't quite happen. At 6:32 p.m. EDT, just in time to make the old-line network evening newscasts, Trump announced "a double sided CEASEFIRE" on Truth Social. "Subject," he went on, "to the Islamic Republic of Iran agreeing to the COMPLETE, IMMEDIATE, and SAFE OPENING of the Strait of Hormuz, I agree to suspend the bombing and attack of Iran for a period of two weeks."

In all these dizzying threats and turnabouts, there are plenteous reverberations of events of the 1970s, which seem to have made a deep impression on the young commercial real-estate developer and reality-TV-star-to-be now in his second term as president.

One memory Trump's postings evoked was that of Richard Nixon's "madman" theory. Make adversaries afraid, he confided to aide Bob Haldeman and national security adviser Henry Kissinger, that your president........

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