What we are watching is not foreign policy but a tantrum conducted with aircraft carriers. The Trump administration has brought to the gravest questions of war and peace the greasy impulsiveness of a man who thinks bluffing is strategy and confusion is strength.
Trump announced, with his usual carnival-barker certainty, that diplomacy was proceeding and delegations were on the move; Reuters then reported that JD Vance had not even left the United States. The same administration that talks like Caesar has had to repeatedly clarify its own threats, lurch from grandiosity to fine print, and now compensates for this moral and intellectual shabbiness by boarding vessels in international waters and calling it resolve.
This is not seriousness. It is geopolitical hooliganism performed by men who would mismanage a raffle, yet have somehow been handed fleets, missiles, and the power to kill strangers by the thousand.
The war that began on February 28, 2026, when the United States and Israel launched wide-ranging strikes against Iran with the stated goal of regime change, has produced a diplomatic theater so farcical that one must periodically remind oneself that actual human beings are dying in it. Trump claimed on April 1 that Iran had just asked the US for a ceasefire and that America would consider it once the Strait of Hormuz was “open, free, and clear,” threatening to blast Iran “back to the Stone Ages” if not. Iran’s foreign ministry called the claim “false and baseless,” which is diplomatic language for “this man is lying again.”
The negotiations that followed would be comical if they were not conducted over the corpses of the recently killed. The JCPOA, that agreement Trump spent his first term denouncing as the worst deal ever negotiated, was the product of years of multilateral diplomacy involving the US, UK, France, Germany, Russia, and China, with nuclear physicists and non-proliferation experts, running to 159 pages. Trump’s replacement framework was negotiated bilaterally by Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner - a property developer and the president’s son-in-law. One might ask what qualifications a real estate heir brings to nuclear non-proliferation, but one suspects the answer would be the same as asking what qualifications a casino owner brings to the presidency.
The ceasefire itself has been a masterwork of administrative incoherence. On April 8, a two-week ceasefire was agreed upon, mediated by Pakistan. Trump then extended it indefinitely on April 24, citing “internal divisions” in Iran. Then on May 10, he declared the ceasefire was “on life support” after rejecting an Iranian proposal as “unacceptable,” complaining he “didn’t even finish reading” what he called “that piece of garbage they sent us.” This is the language of a man reviewing a bad Yelp rating for a restaurant, not a president making decisions about war and peace with a nation of 90 million people.
By June 12, new ceasefire conditions for 60 days were agreed upon, with Trump and Iran’s president signing a memorandum of understanding on June 17 to end the war. Trump has boasted he will achieve a much “better” agreement than the JCPOA, but so far the commitment Iran has made - that it “shall not procure or develop nuclear weapons” - is the same promise it has made for years, including in the 2015 nuclear accord. The only “achievement” of the ceasefire, as one observer noted, is the likely reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, which was open before the war started.
One is invited to marvel at the circularity of this achievement: Trump started a war that closed a strait that was already open, then negotiated a ceasefire that reopens it, and now demands applause for restoring the status quo ante at the cost of thousands of lives and the biggest energy crisis in history. This is not statesmanship; it is the foreign policy equivalent of burning down your house and then demanding credit for calling the fire department.
Meanwhile, Trump has told Congress that US hostilities with Iran have “terminated” during the ongoing ceasefire, arguing he does not need legislative approval for the war. “There has been no exchange of fire between the United States Forces and Iran since April 7, 2026,” he wrote to congressional leaders, as if a pause in killing constitutes a permanent end to conflict. The legal scholars, those patient explainers of constitutional niceties, have pointed out that a ceasefire is not a permanent end to the conflict and that the courts or Congress would be the only means to stop the war if the administration continues it. But Trump has never been one to let constitutional limitations interfere with his impulses, and the Congress, that collection of timorous mediocrities, has collectively rejected nine measures to constrain his war powers since early March 2026.
The administration’s approach to Iran has been characterized by what can only be called weaponized inconsistency. On May 29, Trump met with aides for two hours at the White House about a possible ceasefire extension, having earlier suggested in a social media post that he was ready to make a decision. He insisted Iran give in to a number of his demands it has long resisted, including reopening the strait, pledging never to develop a nuclear bomb, and allowing the United States to remove Iran’s enriched uranium so it could be destroyed. “No money will be exchanged, until further notice,” he declared, as if he were settling a tab at one of his failed casinos rather than conducting international diplomacy.
The Iranians, for their part, have maintained a posture of weary contempt. Their foreign ministry spokesman said that “message exchanges between Iran and the U.S. continue, but no final agreement has been reached,” and reiterated Tehran’s stance that negotiations are “focused on ending the war” and do not concern “the nuclear issue.” Iran’s foreign minister told the Omani minister that a peace deal “is conditional on stopping the excessive demands and inconsistent and contradictory stances from the U.S. side.” One can hardly blame them for noting the contradictions; pointing out Trump’s inconsistency is like pointing out that water is wet.
The so-called “Project Freedom” - the US naval blockade of Iranian shipping - was paused on May 5 after Trump cited requests from “Pakistan and other Countries” and claimed progress toward an agreement. But Iran had already conducted what appear to be its first attacks since the ceasefire on May 4, striking targets in the UAE, with additional attacks in subsequent days. US and Iranian forces traded fire on May 7 as American military vessels transited out through the Strait. This is what the administration calls a ceasefire; the rest of us might call it a pause between rounds.
Iran, meanwhile, is governed by a regime that combines the spiritual charm of a prison warden with the tenderness of a boot heel, and yet Washington and Jerusalem have once again managed the almost comic feat of making these clerical thugs look like the aggrieved party in the eyes of many of their own people.
Tehran now treats the Strait of Hormuz as a long-prepared “golden asset,” a deterrent polished over years and finally unsheathed, while inside the country the regime is still executing people in the wake of the biggest crackdown in the Islamic Republic’s history. That is the true obscenity of this war: it has not liberated Iranians from their jailers; it has given the jailers a national emergency, a ready-made excuse, and a larger cudgel. The mullahs did not deserve rescuing from their own failures. Yet this war of choice has tossed them a lifeline woven from American vanity and Israeli fury.
During the 2025-2026 Iranian protests, Trump repeatedly threatened military strikes against Iran while calling on Iranian protesters to keep protesting and taking over institutions, saying that “help is on the way.” One struggles to imagine a more reckless intervention. The Iranian regime has spent decades characterizing domestic dissent as foreign-instigated subversion, and here was the American president obligingly providing them with evidence. Trump’s statements were not solidarity; they were a gift to the very regime he claimed to oppose, confirmation of every paranoid fantasy the mullahs have ever peddled about American designs on their country.
Following the ceasefire, Trump publicly rebuked Ali Khamenei’s remarks saying Iran won the war with Israel, calling on Khamenei to “tell the truth, you got beat to hell.” In addition, he warned that if Iran were to continue uranium enrichment, the US would strike again. This is the diplomacy of a man who has never outgrown the instincts of a schoolyard bully, who cannot distinguish between strength and bluster, who seems to believe that international relations are governed by the same dynamics as reality television. One almost expects him to challenge Khamenei to a wrestling match.
And Israel, never knowingly outdone where punitive appetite is concerned, continues its old trick of dressing conquest in the dreary costume of “security.” A 5-10 km strip inside Lebanon is occupied and relabeled a “buffer zone.” Maps now show dozens of Lebanese villages under Israeli control with an announced ambition to push occupation up to the Litani River, nearly a tenth of Lebanese territory.
One is invited, as always, to admire the euphemism while ignoring the land grab. The method is by now tediously familiar: bomb, depopulate, rename, entrench, and then ask the world to mistake territorial appetite for strategic prudence. This is not defense in any morally serious sense. It is annexation with a press office, colonial greed with drone footage, and the old intoxication with force that has convinced too many in Israel’s political class that every neighboring ruin is merely a future perimeter.
The Israeli escalation has continued even as the broader ceasefire supposedly holds. Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu ordered the restart of attacks on suburbs of Beirut where Israel wants to go after Hezbollah, an escalation that came despite Lebanese parliament speaker Nabih Berri telling the Trump administration that Hezbollah was prepared for a complete ceasefire with Israel. Israel’s proposal, Berri’s adviser relayed, was for only a partial ceasefire. One must appreciate the chutzpah: Israel demands the right to continue bombing while calling it peace, and the Trump administration, that great champion of “deal-making,” nods along like a spectator at a fixed boxing match.
Trump, for his part, has declared he “doesn’t care” if Iran talks are over, a statement of indifference that would be almost refreshing if it did not come from a man with the power to launch nuclear weapons. This is the same president who, in April 2026, publicly criticized Pope Leo for his soft stance on the Iran war. One might have thought that a president who has demonstrated no particular religious conviction beyond the photo-op would hesitate to lecture the Pope on moral matters, but Trump has never been burdened by self-awareness.
This is not yet the Third World War. But one would have to be drunk on propaganda not to notice the ingredients being laid out on the kitchen table. China has called the US blockade “dangerous and irresponsible” and protested Washington’s seizures. The war has already produced what the head of the IEA calls the biggest energy crisis in history, with Hormuz carrying roughly a fifth of global oil and LNG flows. By March 10, 2026, only 15 ships made it through the Strait of Hormuz. The United States imposed a naval blockade on Iran following the failure of the Islamabad Talks to end the war. Iran said it would view the entry of military vessels near the strait as a breach of the ceasefire and would respond accordingly.
That is how wider catastrophes begin: not with a single melodramatic trumpet blast, but with a collection of mediocre statesmen, militarized narcissists, and ideological pyromaniacs all deciding at once that reality will surely make an exception for their vanity. Trump supplies the ignorance, Tehran the fanaticism, and Israel’s war cabinet the relentless colonial nerve. Between them, they have made the world more expensive, more frightened, more brutal, and more combustible. It is not statesmanship. It is arson carried out by men in suits who expect history to call them firefighters.
The administration’s diplomatic efforts have been conducted with all the finesse of a property negotiation, which is perhaps unsurprising given that the chief negotiators are property developers. The Islamabad talks in April 2026 brought together Vice President JD Vance, Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff, and son-in-law Jared Kushner on the American side, while the Iranian delegation included Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi and Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf. One can only imagine the cultural exchange: American real estate interests meeting Iranian revolutionary ideology, each side convinced of its own superiority, neither capable of understanding the other’s worldview.
The sanctions regime has been equally incoherent. On February 25, 2026, the Treasury Department imposed sanctions on more than 30 individuals, entities, and vessels linked to Iran’s oil shipping network. On April 8, Trump wrote that “We are, and will be, talking Tariff and Sanctions relief with Iran.” Members of Congress have sought to block or support sanctions relief, including via measures to condition or mandate congressional review of executive branch actions. But the broader pattern is clear: sanctions imposed, sanctions threatened, sanctions lifted, sanctions reimposed, all according to the whims of a president who treats international finance as though it were one of his bankruptcy proceedings.
The human cost of this amateur hour has been staggering. The war that began in February has killed thousands, displaced hundreds of thousands, disrupted global energy supplies, and brought the world closer to a broader regional conflict than at any time since the Iraq invasion. And for what? For a ceasefire that restores the status quo ante? For a memorandum of understanding that reproduces commitments Iran had already made? For the satisfaction of a president’s ego and the enrichment of his son-in-law’s diplomatic resume?
One is reminded, inevitably, of the Iraq disaster, that previous adventure in American hubris that was supposed to transform the Middle East and instead transformed it into a charnel house. The same cast of characters - the same type of armchair warriors, the same breed of ideological zealots, the same species of media cheerleaders - has now produced a sequel that matches the original in folly while exceeding it in theatrical absurdity. At least the Iraq war was sold with some pretense of planning; this one has been conducted with the improvisational recklessness of a man who has never been held accountable for anything in his life.
The Trump administration’s broader foreign policy has been characterized by the same combination of bluster and incompetence. The president has proposed taking over the Gaza Strip, forcibly relocating the Palestinian population to other Arab states like Jordan and Egypt, and making Gaza into a special economic zone. One might call this the Trump Plan for Peace: ethnic cleansing rebranded as urban renewal, genocide dressed up as gentrification. The Arabs are expected to accept the mass deportation of their fellow Arabs; the Palestinians are expected to accept their own disappearance; the world is expected to admire the “vision” of a man who sees the Middle East as nothing more than a series of development opportunities.
In November 2025, Trump posted that “at my direction, South Africa will NOT be receiving an invitation to the 2026 G20,” declaring that “South Africa has demonstrated to the World they are not a country worthy of Membership anywhere, and we are going to stop all payments and subsidies to them, effective immediately.” This is the foreign policy of a man who treats international relations like a country club membership committee, expelling nations that displease him with the same casual cruelty he once applied to contestants on his television show.
The administration has even found time to issue travel bans against EU officials supporting net regulations and internet hate speech laws, including Thierry Breton. One must appreciate the irony: a president who claims to be a champion of free speech using travel bans to punish foreign officials for their speech regulations. But consistency has never been Trump’s strong suit; he is a man of impulses, not principles, and his foreign policy reflects this fundamental character flaw.
If one wanted a summary fit for engraving, it would be this: the United States is being led by a blowhard who confuses bluff with statecraft, Iran by zealots who know how to turn siege into leverage, and Israel by men who seem to regard every ceasefire as an administrative pause before the next seizure of land. The public is then asked to admire this as realism. It is not realism. It is a moral sewer. It is the rule of the loud, the cruel, and the short-sighted.
The tragedy - and one uses the word deliberately this time, for what else can one call the deliberate destruction of diplomatic possibility - is that there were alternatives. The JCPOA, for all its imperfections, was containing Iran’s nuclear program. The international coalition that negotiated it represented the kind of multilateral diplomacy that actually produces results. But Trump abandoned it in his first term, declaring he could get a “better deal,” and has now spent his second term producing a worse one at the cost of a war. This is not negotiation; it is demolition followed by a press conference.
The Iranians have watched this performance with a mixture of contempt and calculation. They understand, as the Americans apparently do not, that time is on their side. The US cannot occupy Iran; the US cannot bomb Iran into submission; the US cannot even maintain a coherent negotiating position for more than a few days. The Iranian regime, for all its brutality and incompetence, has demonstrated a survival instinct that the Trump administration, with its attention span of a goldfish, cannot match. They have waited out presidents before; they will wait out this one.
And if civilization now feels as though it is balanced on a rotten beam above a furnace, that is because it is being governed by exactly the sort of people who would smoke in an ammunition depot and then denounce the explosion as somebody else’s extremism.