An Anti-war demonstrator holds up a sign with a symbol of peace as they gather near the White House to protest the war in Iran on April 7, in Washington, D.C.Alex Wong/Getty Images
Shrouded in ambiguity, marked by colliding interpretations of what Iran and the United States have agreed to and freighted with conflicting visions of the future of the Middle East, the ceasefire that came at the 11th hour Tuesday is saturated with unanswered questions.
For Iran, it averts a catastrophic barrage of remorseless destruction that Donald Trump threatened would rain down from above. For the United States, the agreement offers a pause and perhaps an end to a conflict that divided the country, fractured the President’s MAGA movement, sent gasoline prices flying above the politically forbidden barrier of US$4 a gallon, threatened runaway inflation at the grocery store and seriously imperilled Republican prospects in November’s midterm elections.
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And overall, the agreement − fragile, almost certainly upholstered with elements that either side could exploit to restart the fighting − calls a halt, if only for a fortnight, to a humanitarian calamity that, if Mr. Trump is to be taken at his word, was on the precipice of growing incomprehensibly more serious.
This much − or, in fact, this little − is known: Whatever the contours of this agreement, whatever the difficulties and geopolitical implications ahead, the great uncertainties are mixing with great relief.
No American president − not Abraham Lincoln (who fought the Civil War over the preservation of the Union and the abolition of slavery) nor Franklin Delano Roosevelt (who steered the country through a two-front conflict during the Second World War) nor Richard Nixon (who fought both domestic unrest and North Vietnamese intransigence) ever employed language remotely like Mr. Trump’s threat that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.”
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Woodrow Wilson, president during the First World War, used starkly different rhetoric in referring to the stakes for civilization when, in April, 1917, he took the country into the fighting in Europe, saying, “It is a fearful thing to lead this great peaceful people into war, into the most terrible and disastrous of all wars, civilization itself seeming to be in the balance.”
It was Mr. Wilson, who ascended from the presidency of Princeton University and the governor’s chair in New Jersey after campaigning on domestic issues, who said just before he took office in 1913 that “it would be the irony of fate if my administration had to deal chiefly with foreign affairs.”
Mr. Trump may be thinking the same thing. His 2024 campaign was punctuated with vows not to engage the U.S. military in battle. Though many elements of his coalition stuck with him during the contretemps with Venezuela and the weeks-long battle with Iran, several prominent MAGA figures recoiled at how he veered from his pledge.
An Iranian resident looks out the window of his damaged home after Israeli-American strikes that, according to local media, reportedely destroyed the Rafi-Nia Synagogue and nearby residential buildings in Tehran, on April 7.-/AFP/Getty Images
Just this week, commentator Tucker Carlson said Mr. Trump’s threats against Iran courted categorization as “a war crime, a moral crime” and characterized the President’s destruction-of-a-civilization message as “vile on every level.” Former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, once among the most vocal MAGA voices on Capitol Hill, spoke of “evil and madness” and raised the spectre of the 25th Amendment, an instrument to remove a sitting president, suggesting Mr. Trump was suffering from mental incapacity.
The President also began to feel pressure from congressional Republicans, who earlier refused to invoke the War Powers Resolution restrictions on his actions in Iran but were growing impatient with the war, hearing worries from constituents about rising prices and growing fearful that the Democrats would take control of the House of Representatives in November and, if the conflict dragged on and victory remained elusive, of the Senate as well.
Republican Sen. John Curtis of Utah argued that American forces should not continue to be engaged unless Congress issued a declaration of war. (Even in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, the United States was not technically at war, as Congress did not formally declare war in any of those cases.) Republican Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina indicated that he might seek to end funding for the war if it exceeded 60 days in duration, a significant threshold in the War Powers Resolution.
It has been clear for several days that Iran was not going to bend to Mr. Trump’s threats and reopen the Strait of Hormuz, the waterway where a fifth of the world’s oil passes, based on Mr. Trump’s demands alone.
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“Iran has an intensely proud culture, and Iranians don’t take kindly to anybody telling them what to do,” said Daniel Thomas Potts, a professor of ancient Near Eastern archeology and history at New York University.
“They scorn other countries that want to lord it over them. They had the palaces of Persepolis when others were running around half-naked. They’re a very proud people − of their literary tradition, of their architecture, of their achievements in science, and not only medieval science but today’s science.”
In the end, powerful American firepower encountered powerful Iranian resistance − and the tentative result is an end to the fighting. In the coming days, the destiny of Iran’s nuclear-weapons program may be revealed. That, after all, was the ostensible cause of the fighting, the pretext for the massive destruction, in the first place.
Editor’s note: This article has been updated to state that Thom Tillis is the senator for North Carolina.