Well, there is a ceasefire. Or perhaps not. It includes Lebanon. Or it doesn’t. Iran’s 10-point plan is an acceptable working document for the United States. Or it isn’t the one U.S. negotiators saw. The Strait of Hormuz will be open. Or passage requires Iranian approval and a toll.
All this confusion is unsurprising, because the only meeting of the minds between President Donald Trump and whoever is ruling in Tehran was that the United States would stop attacking Iran. In return, Iran would stop attacking all its Arab neighbors and Israel—though not immediately, we soon learned. My own guess is that at the end of two weeks allotted for negotiations, two more weeks will be allotted, and then two more. There may never be much more than a ceasefire agreed, given the distance between Iranian and American demands. (A random thought: Trump could never have done this if Iran had captured the second crew member. It would have been a display of weakness of the kind that he’s avoided.) A simple ceasefire may be far from the worst outcome, because it avoids U.S. concessions that might be part of any detailed bilateral agreement.
An accounting of gains and losses for the United States is therefore temporary and incomplete. If the ceasefire really breaks down (for instance, because Iran insists that Israel stop responding to Hezbollah attacks, which Israel will not do) the president will have to do something more than the air attacks of last week. That will mean a broader bombing campaign which, though it will not destroy Iranian civilization, will destroy a number of bridges and power plants. That should not be surprising or unacceptable, because Iran spent the first hours after the ceasefire announcement attacking power and desalination plants and oil sites in the Arab Gulf countries. Or, Trump might decide the time has come to seize some islands in the Gulf. This would all be unwelcome for Trump, who wants the war over, the stock market up, and oil prices steadily (if slowly) descending. He will only do it if the Iranian regime leaves him no other choice.
They might. We know little about how decisions are being made in Tehran, except that they are not being made by the new Supreme Leader, who may be in a coma. Until Mojtaba Khamenei speaks to the nation, it’s fair to assume that every word issued in his name is a product of the opaque group running the country. And that group may at some point decide that another round of fighting would be useful—to head off an internal uprising, for example.
Whatever we may say about the ruling group, it consists exclusively of hard-line regime survivors, mostly from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps or closely tied to it. Trump’s and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s claims that there has been regime change because new thugs have replaced older ones are absurd, and this lie undermines everything else they say about the war. The new group of top apparatchiks overlaps with the older one—the one that killed over 30,000 unarmed fellow citizens in January.
For now, there are short- and long-term issues to resolve if the ceasefire sticks.
The first is Hormuz: Is it open or not? Trump says yes, absolutely, but then suggests Iran might charge tolls and we might split them—so typically Trumpian and outrageous that this may be his actual view. Iran says ships will need Iranian permission and must pay tolls. The United States should never accept that Iran can close, or demand payment for passage in, an international waterway. Many shippers might be willing to make some under-the-table payments in crypto. But Trump will be courting great trouble for the United States by allowing Tehran a real role, and he should understand this; after all, if the Strait is not truly open to international shipping, his whole war will be judged a great failure. And the United States as a maritime nation will have abandoned a key right of free passage.
The second issue is nukes. Trump forfeited the right to be believed on what Iran has and does not have when he said he had “obliterated” their nuclear program in the 2025 12-day war, but then had to strike nuclear sites again and again over the last five weeks. His demands (no enrichment, full International Atomic Energy Agency [IAEA] inspections, highly enriched uranium out of Iran) are exactly right, and Iran has publicly agreed to none of this.
Left to its own devices, the Iranian regime will return to trying to build nuclear weapons as soon as it can. Chances are that Trump, or his successor, or the Israelis, will need to bomb again after a while—assuming the regime survives Trump. For now, the critical thing is that the United States should not compromise our position: Iran cannot enrich more uranium, the highly enriched uranium it already has must be removed from Iran, and because of its years of deception, Iran must agree to inspections by the IAEA. Iran will cheat, but the cheating can at least be restrained and more easily exposed.
The third issue is sanctions. Lifting any sanctions, as Trump has already said may be on the table, serves only to enrich the regime. This allows it to begin subsidizing its terrorist proxies again, rebuilding its missile and nuclear programs, and repressing Iranians seeking freedom. No sanctions should be lifted, period. But as we have seen in the Venezuelan case—where Trump has also claimed to see a nonexistent regime change—Trump cannot be trusted to maintain full pressure on the regime. It would help here if congressional Republicans spoke up, in private and in public, to maintain sanctions fully.
What did the war achieve? Trumpian exaggerations make it difficult to separate real achievements from silly claims such as regime change, and mainstream press coverage has been completely one-sided (and if you think CNN has been bad, try BBC or ITN in Britain). But there are real accomplishments. Iran’s ballistic missile and nuclear programs have been set back by years, and its ability to rebuild them has been greatly delayed by attacks on its defense industrial base. Fuel, the ability to create more fuel, labs, scientists, and factories have been destroyed. Iran’s relations with its Gulf neighbors will never be the same, because the regime chose to attack even its “friends” in Oman and Qatar, and to attack civilian targets like desalination plants and civilian airports.
The regime’s legitimacy is severely undermined at home because its top official, Ali Khamenei, was killed, and his replacement is his son (in a violation of the regime’s supposed opposition to dynastic rule, on behalf of someone who is not actually an ayatollah at all), who cannot function. Moreover, dozens of top-level officials with great experience have been killed, and the regime is likely to be even less effective in governing. The economy, already in awful shape, has taken another great hit (unless, again, the regime is rescued because Trump starts lifting sanctions).
Will Iranians now rise up against the regime? History teaches that we have no ability to guess this: The fall of the Soviet Union, and of Nicolae Ceauşescu in Romania, Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali in Tunisia, Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, and Bashar al-Assad in Syria, were not predicted. But asking the question is a good reminder that the provisional and highly partisan judgments of success or failure being made today may look foolish in six months or six years. And if the regime does fall in a few years, it will be hard to deny that this war advanced the date meaningfully. On the other hand, if Trump lifts sanctions in a deal with the regime remnants—and thereby both abandons the struggle of the Iranian people for freedom just months after the January uprising and mass killings, and gives new resources to the regime—it will be hard to defend the loss of 13 American service members with that as the outcome.
Despite the 24-hour cable news demand for conclusions and for certainty, everything we can say today is provisional. Much has been achieved, and it can be built upon or thrown away. Place your bets.
