An Uncertain Cease-Fire

National Review Online

Wednesday, April 08, 2026

 

What a difference a day makes. Twenty-four hours ago, Trump was talking of a Persian Götterdämmerung, and now he’s talking of running the Strait of Hormuz with the Iranians.

 

Amid presidential threats to destroy Iranian civilization, Trump and Iran signed on to a two-week cease-fire mediated by Pakistan, a client of China.

 

The U.S. and Iran have two sets of negotiating demands that are worlds apart. The difference is between Iran being completely defanged as a regional power and verifiably giving up its nuclear aspirations on the one hand, and Iran and its proxies getting formally recognized as regional players, with a significant source of new revenue via the Strait of Hormuz, on the other. This is the kind of gap in worldviews and strategic ends that is the predicate for a shooting war — which, indeed, it was a month ago and may well be again sooner rather than later. (Already, Iran has said it is halting traffic on the Strait of Hormuz until Israel stops attacking Lebanon. But the U.S. has said that Lebanon is not part of the cease-fire agreement.)

 

On the positive side of the ledger, on February 27, Iran had air defenses, a navy, an air force, and a rapidly increasing missile and drone force; it has none of those today. The upper echelons of its political and IRGC leadership have been wiped out. Its defense-industrial capacity, nuclear infrastructure, petrochemical industry, and repressive apparatus have all taken hammer blows. Its economy, in a shambles prior to the war, is now in even worse shape.

 

From the perspective of October 6, 2023, the Iranian regime and its proxies around the region have suffered catastrophic setbacks.

 

For all that, though, the Islamic Republic is still standing, despite Trump’s insistence it has already effectively fallen. Not only that, Tehran has chips to play during the negotiations and post-combat phase more generally — namely, de facto control of the Strait of Hormuz and the demonstrated ability to punish the Gulf states even while under sustained military pressure.

 

There were several problems in the strategic conception of the U.S.-Israel campaign.

 

One was that regime change, the only event that would have brought a decisive end to the war, was unlikely to be achieved from the air. It’s possible that, after the pounding it has taken over the last several weeks, the Iranian regime will be considerably more vulnerable to a popular revolt in coming months. One certainly hopes so. The fact remains, though, that the regime still has the guns and protesters in the street do not.

 

Another is that it was too hard to go and snatch Iran’s highly enriched uranium in a military operation, which is what it would have taken to put a true punctuation mark on Iran’s nuclear program.

 

And, least forgivably, the administration underestimated how easily Iran could effectively control the Strait of Hormuz, a mistake that, according to credible reports, emanated from President Trump himself. Evidently uninterested in undertaking the protracted and risky military operation necessary to reopen the strait by force, the president flailed around in response. He urged shippers to transit the strait regardless of the risks. He pushed the Europeans to take the lead. At times, he minimized the importance of free navigation of the strait, and at others, he said it would reopen naturally at the end of the war. And, finally, he threatened to end Iranian civilization if Tehran didn’t give up control of the strait.

 

Well, Iranian civilization is still standing, and Iran still controls the strait. It is demanding $2 million per ship allowed to transit. While it seems unlikely anyone — whether other countries or insurance companies — would accept such an arrangement, an Iranian ability to toll the strait at any level would blow a hole in a continued U.S. maximum pressure campaign.

 

The last several weeks have catalyzed action to find ways to transport crude and other materials without the waterway, and those will have to continue apace. Trump’s fanciful talk of working with the Iranians to run the strait is another sign of how intractable a problem this will be.

 

The Trump administration was correct to consider it intolerable that Iran might develop such a robust missile and drone force that it could deter military action to stop it from developing a nuclear weapon. We have presumably set back its missile and nuclear programs for years, as well as kneecapping its regional power. The war has therefore enhanced our national security, but we shouldn’t look past the strategic costs — global economic distress, more turmoil in the Western alliance, depleted weapons stocks, benefits to the Russian oil economy, and the message that’s been sent to China.

 

Yes, as we’ve seen in Venezuela and Iran, our weapons systems are superior to theirs, but the Chinese have no doubt noted how pressure on markets can move President Trump and how a much less powerful state has, stunningly, been able to deny the U.S. Navy access to a narrow, contested waterway.

 

The rejoinder to those who called Trump’s attack on Iran “a war of choice” is that the war has been ongoing for nearly half a century. There’s a cease-fire for now, but there won’t be an end to the larger war until the Islamic Republic falls.