Trump Just Stepped Off the Escalation Trap and Ended the Iran War

Trump speaking Wed. at the G7 Summit in France, as Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and Secretary of State Marco Rubio look on.

President Trump just did a remarkable thing. Of course we Democrats can’t say so, since we’re an opposition party defined by opposing Trump, not war. (Top Democrats actually wanted the war with Iran, although they kept it low key.) But make no mistake, Trump was right to step off the escalation trap and take us from a war footing with Iran, towards peace.

Democrats are quick to point out that this was a war of Trump’s choice in the first place (which it was), that Iran will soon have billions of dollars filling its coffers (which it apparently will), and that Iran exits the war in a stronger geopolitical position than it started, thanks to its now-established ability to control the Strait of Hormuz when it so chooses.

These are all good and accurate points, but do they matter right now? We were (and are still) faced with a stark choice: do we want more war — killing Iranian men, women and children, while further stressing Americans at the pump — or peace?

If the answer wasn’t obvious enough, here’s another factor to consider: the more war option comes with a nonzero chance of the US or Israel dropping a nuclear bomb on Iran, as I worried out loud in April:

Maybe because I’m a glass half-empty kind of guy, I’m struggling to see how the US and Israel’s war on Iran ends without Trump’s threat of nuclear annihilation being realized.

I arrived at that horrifying conclusion by being unable to square the following circle: Donald J. Trump cares most in this world about appearing strong; indeed, he built his empire on this premise. But it’s not just a business strategy; Trump struggles to accept reality when it runs counter to this self-image. If that sounds far-fetched, ask him who won the 2020 election.

If he can’t accept losing to Joe Biden, a fellow white Christian, how can Trump admit battlefield defeat to darker-skinned Muslims he called “animals”? Yet Trump has indeed lost…

Unable to admit defeat, Trump is living in a twilight zone. Right now, any Tom, Dick or Bibi who presents Trump with an idea that keeps his victory fantasy alive even for a few more days, is liable to get the green light. When these “brilliant” ideas inevitably fail – Let’s blockade the Strait of Hormuz to unblock it! – Trump is left only more susceptible to the next charlatan who enters the Oval Office.

I didn’t think Trump had it in him to step back from the brink, yet that’s exactly what he’s done. Factions within his own party are furious, while Democrats see a chance to score political points — but they should tread carefully, writes Trita Parsi, co-founder of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft:

Trump currently owns this failed war, but if the Democrats help torpedo the MOU and war resumes, then they will co-own the next war. Trump’s disaster will become theirs as well…

The task now is not to reward Trump politically, nor to excuse the recklessness that produced this war. It is to prevent the war from returning. Democrats can condemn the decision to start it without sabotaging the agreement that ends it. They can hold Trump accountable without helping Netanyahu drag the United States back into conflict. The choice before them is not between opposing Trump and supporting peace. It is between learning from America’s endless wars and repeating them.

Watching Trump’s extraordinary press conference on the Iran deal at the G7 Summit in France on Wednesday, I was most encouraged when I heard him say that he didn’t want to be remembered as another Herbert Hoover, a president who diddled around as the US fell into the Great Depression.

Normally Trump’s compulsion to be remembered has him etching his name on everything, like a dog lifting its leg at every corner. But in this instance, Trump’s compulsion worked to our advantage. To avoid being the next Hoover — which was a real possibility if the war continued and the global economy cratered — Trump is moving towards peace. And he’s doing so based on his own self-interest, which is good because that’s pretty much the only reason Trump will do anything. God bless whoever whispered the Hoover comparison in Trump’s ear.

I realize there are still many impediments to peace, not least of which is the mercurial US president himself. But in the interim, we’re talking with Iran, not blowing up their elementary schools.

Another major impediment to peace is Israel, which got us into this war in the first place, and which might cease functioning as a country if it doesn’t have a war to fight. (The ritual slaughter of Palestinians just won’t cut it these days.)

Desperate to keep the Iran war going, Israel has been furiously attacking Lebanon in hopes of forcing Iran to come to the defense of its ally, Hezbollah, which in turn may blow up the US-Iran deal being negotiated. A draft of that deal calls for Israel to stop attacking Lebanon (the text doesn’t name Israel, but says the US and Iran will be “ensuring the territorial integrity and sovereignty of Lebanon”).

While Trump may be an unstable man who you and I detest, he just (hopefully) ended our war with Iran — a country we had no business attacking this year, last year, or back in 1953. Regardless of the shameful backstory to the war, if only to preserve our species, Trump’s latest move is to be commended.

Like President Nixon did with China, Trump is putting things on the table that no Democrat would ever dream of. He’s proposing to do no less than bring Iran in from the cold by waving sanctions and allowing in billions in investment from Iran’s Gulf neighbors, thereby interweaving the region’s economies, an important step in making their return to hostilities less likely. Not even President Obama’s 2015 Iran nuclear deal, which was excellent, went anywhere near this far in incorporating Iran into the global economy. Right before our eyes, Trump is blowing up the bipartisan consensus that Iran is the boogeyman, which was always bullshit.

Lastly, Trump is also putting Israel in its place in a way no president has before, certainly not in my lifetime. And Vice President JD Vance went even father Thursday, issuing a stark warning to Israeli critics of the peace deal.

“Donald J. Trump is the only head of state in the entire world who is sympathetic to the nation of Israel at this moment in time,” so maybe think twice before “attacking the only powerful ally” you have left, Vance warned, adding, “two-thirds” of Israel’s weapons over the past three months have been “paid for by American taxpayers.”

Obviously Trump is fickle, and he may be back to threatening Iran with nuclear holocaust by this time tomorrow. But right now he’s tuned to a better channel, and it’s important that Democrats not impede a potential peace deal.

“Trump and Netanyahu should never have started the war on Iran, and Congress should have stopped it,” peace activist Medea Benjamin of Code Pink wrote on her Substack page.

But now it has to end. There is an agreement on the table, and we should do everything we can to make it work. The priority has to be ending the bloodshed—not finding new excuses to prolong it.