It’s tough to reach an agreement with a President whose word is not his bond.
By Susan B. Glasser
Source photograph by Andrew Caballero-Reynolds / AFP / Getty
So how, exactly, does America’s war with Iran, the one that Donald Trump said would probably be over in a couple of days, or four to six weeks, nearly eight weeks ago, end?
Since Trump has thus far failed to achieve the peace deal that he—and the world’s financial markets—had anticipated by the end of his two-week ceasefire with the hard-line Iranian regime, the conflict has entered into a liminal state that Gideon Rachman, of the Financial Times, called “the fog of peace.” It’s a murkiness befitting a President who has conducted this conflict in the Middle East as a one-man smoke machine obscuring reality behind such a cloud of lies and disinformation that it’s difficult to imagine that even Trump himself could keep straight what is real and what is fiction. On Monday, he told the New York Post that Vice-President J. D. Vance was in the air en route to Pakistan to seal an agreement with Iran. But Vance had never left, and, days later, he still hadn’t. By Tuesday, after variously threatening to bomb all of Iran to smithereens and claiming that he was on the brink of a “FAR BETTER” deal to halt Iran’s nuclear program than any of his predecessors, Trump unilaterally announced an indefinite ceasefire.
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