If this war gives you vertigo it’s not your fault. Overnight Thursday into the wee hours of Friday Donald Trump declared peace in a salvo of posts on Truth Social, a theme he continued into Saturday even as the lead Iranian negotiator said in his own posts on X that everything Trump had said was untrue.

By Friday Israel and Lebanon had announced a ceasefire and Iran said that the Strait of Hormuz was open again—so long as ships hug the Iranian shore as they transit. Trump said he may go to Pakistan to sign a peace accord if one is achieved. Benchmark oil futures were down below $89 on Friday morning.

By Saturday morning, Iran had closed the Strait again and fired on two vessels, one of which India had earlier contracted to pay the Iranian toll. For its part, the U.S. said it would move from interdicting Iranian vessels to boarding them, an escalation of what was already an act of war. Trump suggested that the ceasefire might not be extended when it ends on Wednesday.

Charting the daily ebb and flow of the war and its fragile diplomacy risks eliding the actual reality of this war, which is that it’s not going to end any time soon. Part of the problem is that anything Trump says about the war is intrinsically untrustworthy. He yo-yos from proclaiming peace and victory to threatening further destruction, but nothing he says is connected to reality on the ground.

For their part, the Iranians rightly point to how untrustworthy the Americans are and continue to maintain that they have won the war and will settle it on their own terms. They have no intention of giving up their enriched uranium or relinquishing their new role as toll collectors in the international waters along their shore.

Maximalist stances are typical at the start of negotiations, but as Robert Pape points out, in this case the two sides are engaged in a zero-sum game. The two main issues for the U.S.—opening the Strait and eliminating Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium—have no middle ground.

Either the Strait is reopened and free, or it isn’t. Either Iran keeps its uranium or it gives it up. For the war to end, one side has to lose, and the stakes for the Iranian regime are existential, undergirded by an eschatology that sees the suffering of the war as presaging the end times and revelation of the 12^th prophet, Mahdi.

Despite Trump’s protestations that the regime has been changed and is more reasonable, the war has only hardened the Iranian leadership, which is controlled by hardline Revolutionary Guards now, and they know that in the threat of mutual destruction they hold the stronger card, since all they need to do is wait.

The fundamental point of all this seems to be that the U.S. cannot dictate terms to the IRGC leadership, so that the only pathway to actual peace in the region lies through what will amount to a strategic victory for Iran. It turns out that the 2015 agreement Obama forged with Iran was probably the best that the U.S. could hope for. Whatever comes next will be much worse.

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It seems impossible to say anything useful about the present course of the war. The American president is aged and irrational, more susceptible to influence than to sound advice—as he demonstrated by ignoring the warnings from advisors that Iran would not be like Venezuela and that the Strait of Hormuz was at risk if he went to war.

Whether Trump has simply lost it or is pursuing (in his own mind) some sort of madman diplomacy doesn’t matter. The Iranians have their hands on the oil spigot, along with several other vital export flows, and further U.S. escalation risks even deeper global economic disaster than the downturn the world already is experiencing.

Any longer-term settlement that would reopen the Strait requires that Netanyahu fall in line with the U.S., and Trump hasn’t even tried to provide with any face-saving measures, announcing as he did the ceasefire in Lebanon before Israel’s security counsel had seen it. Iran might be willing to sacrifice Hezbollah, but only at the cost of substantial U.S. concessions on other issues.

Israel has the ability to break any fragile truce, and it has a long history of undermining U.S. negotiations with Iran, in part by assassinating any Iranian who engages in them, while Iran seems to understand the pressure on Trump much better than anyone in the Trump administration understands Iran.

Trump can win this war militarily, but only at a scale and cost that would wreck the global economy and leave tens or hundreds of thousands dead. Or he can make the concessions that would end the fighting and leave Iran much stronger than it was before the bombing began.

Pape argues that Iran has already emerged as a fourth great power because of U.S. attack, able to control about 20 percent of the world’s oil along with a similar part of other vital commodities like helium and urea. Although interests diverge, it shares the United States as a common enemy with Russia and China, and both of those powers have provided support to Iran during the war.

The three nations between them share a substantial portion of the world’s energy resources and production capacity (in the case of China.). The question the U.S. faces is not how to prevent the emergence of Iran as a fourth great power, but rather how best to manage the change in global strategic balance caused by the war, which is certainly the greatest foreign policy blunder in U.S. history.

America’s war has hurt its one-time allies the most, particularly in South Asia and the Pacific, while it has been waged in a fashion that has entirely isolated the U.S. from Europe and caused partners in the Gulf to begin thinking of China as a safer friend. The United States is acting as a rogue, lawless nation, and the loss of goodwill around the world has been well-documented in national polling.

In an essay in his substance The Long Memo entitled “The Hegemon Didn’t Lose. It Quit,” Bryan C. del Monte argues that the war has caused an irreversible change in America’s role in the international order, one leaving a vacuum that no other nation, including China, is ready to fill.

In the cycle of history that began after the second war, the U.S. served as a guarantor of global stability, in economic terms as much as, or more so, than military ones. There were no global wars during that 80-year American century, and at times of dire economic risk, the U.S. acted to prevent the sort of disaster that befall the global economy in the 1930s.

That’s over now, according to del Monte, and while one might expect China to replace U.S. in that role, he says that China isn’t ready to provide that sort of stability: the renminbi is not ready to take over from the dollar, its internal economy is fraught with challenges, and China’s military is not ready to project force beyond its own region.

Whether this scenario is simply possible or likely depends on what kind of agreement Trump can make with Iran. Perhaps it is possible that Iran will agree to some new international arrangement regarding the Strait, perhaps in exchange for security assurances and the lifting of sanctions, along with reconstruction aid. It has already said it is willing to compromise on its nuclear program, but certainly not to the point of giving it up, since that would be tantamount to acknowledging defeat.

That’s the offramp for Trump, or something like it, and maybe if he takes it he can then turn his summit meeting with Xi into some sort of success and spend some time trying to mend ties with our allies in Europe and Asia.

Maybe this war marks peak Trump and after it he’ll be reined in enough to show the world that if it waits him out a saner, more internationally-oriented administration will come in to salvage what is left of America’s traditional role. That seems more hopeful than probable to me.

Iran is not going to give Trump a paper victory to let him save face. I’m not sure that they even know how to do that, based on reports from earlier negotiations about how hard it was to reach mutual understanding. Iran’s mistrust of Trump must be absolute—how could it not be? Any agreement that ends the war will demonstrate how badly the U.S. lost in strategic terms.

Trump’s only alternative is to raise the stakes on the battlefield, either through an invasion to seize the uranium, military action to reopen the Strait, or a criminal bombing campaign against civilian infrastructure.

Any escalation risks crashing the market, which has remained irrationally optimistic through all of this, reaching new record highs last week. Investors are gambling on Trump and still buying the dip, and it will keep working for them until it doesn’t.

Saturday’s news was bad enough that it would spook the markets on Monday, and on Sunday morning, as I was drafting this, Trump used Truth Social to say that he was sending Witkoff and Kushner back for more talks in Pakistan, even as he reiterated his war-crime threat that “the United States is going to knock out every single Power Plant, and every single bridge, in Iran. NO MOE MR. NICE GUY!”

Trump has been jawboning the markets for weeks now, buying time while he waits for Iran to fold, but all the Iranians have is time. They’re not going anywhere. And while it is clear that political officials within Iran’s ruling coalition are worried about electricity and food, the guys with the weapons are calling the shots.

If I played the prediction markets, I would bet on a military strike this week, with the Kushner-Witkoff duo serving as cover, a repeat of the scenario with which the war began. The odds might be better on some extension of the ceasefire, but the longer U.S. troops are staged for deployment, the stronger the pressure to use them.

Iranian negotiators neither trust nor respect Trump’s amateurs, and the chance of any significant breakthrough coming this week seem much less likely to me than the odds Trump will pull down one of the guns he has hanging on his wall in the situation room and use it.

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