39 Days: Too Much or Not Enough?

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 is irrational and angry, that he may be on the brink of wielding America's awesome power in destructive and unpredictable ways, so that the adversaries, full of dread, will do what he wants.

Of course, Nixon and his aides didn't tell the public about this at the time. Indeed, the revelations of his Machiavellian maneuvering -- yes, Machiavelli actually advocated feigning madness in his "Discourses on Livy" -- and his coarse language most Americans in the 1970s found shocking.

In contrast, Trump proclaims his own negotiating moves in public in ALL CAPS and on his own app, and he employs language that the public in the 2020s has grown accustomed to from streaming series in which characters utter an implausible, apparently obligatory number of F-words per hour.

There's no question that, as Trump was at pains to say, the military achieved most of its objectives. With astonishingly minimal losses and the astonishing retrieval of a downed pilot, the United States and its allies more than decimated the Iranian regime's leadership, vastly reduced its supplies of and capacity to replenish weaponry, and vastly degraded, if not destroyed, its nuclear weapons programs.

But it was unable to restore the shipping lanes of the Strait of Hormuz, which allowed Iran's rulers to impose costs on European allies, East Asian economies, and American voters. And the drawdowns on U.S. munitions supplies threatened to undermine the credibility of American deterrence in Asia: a concern for an administration whose national security strategy placed East Asia above the Middle East among its priorities.

Against Iran, Trump failed to duplicate his success in abducting Nicolas Maduro and intimidating his chosen successor to refrain from extraterritorial behavior the U.S. opposes. He fell even further short of eliminating a regime bloody from fresh suppression of domestic opponents and scornful of international mores since its seizure and imprisonment for 444 days of U.S. diplomats -- an act of war for which it has never apologized.

That regime may not last forever. "Iranian authorities," writes Reuters' Phil Stewart, "emerge battered and isolated with an economy in tatters, little prospect of rapid recovery and an impoverished, embittered population." Their relationship with their affluent Gulf neighbors "has been severed -- maybe for decades."

History tells us that there is no simple formula for when a successful revolution breaks out. So far, Israeli predictions and American hopes that a military battering would prompt revolutionary regime change in Iran have not been fulfilled, but they may yet be.

In the meantime, questions abound. Trump is apparently sending Vice President JD Vance, who obviously was skeptical of military action against Iran, to Islamabad, Pakistan, to negotiate with Iranians under the auspices of Pakistan's far-from-entirely-friendly government.

Pakistan's close ties with an adversarial China are disturbing, and put at risk the increasingly close ties with India that administrations starting with Bill Clinton's and including Trump's have successfully pursued. Kissinger used Pakistan to make contact with China. Is China now using Pakistan to make the United States pay Iran for opening the Strait of Hormuz?

Another question: Will Vance take a side trip some 75 miles to visit Pakistan's military academy in Abbottabad and the nearby compound where Osama bin Laden hung out for months until he was killed by U.S. special forces?

"No negotiation is ever final," a real estate developer once told me, and that seems to hold for Trump. He has done much to diminish Iran's capacity for evil extraterritorial behavior but nothing that has proved effective yet to fulfill the encouragement he gave in January to its oppressed people. Thirty-nine days: Maybe it should have been fewer, or more.

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Michael Barone is a senior political analyst for the Washington Examiner, resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and longtime co-author of The Almanac of American Politics. His new book, "Mental Maps of the Founders: How Geographic Imagination Guided America's Revolutionary Leaders," is now available.