Ever since Donald Trump proclaimed a ceasefire, Israel has bombed Lebanon with yet greater ferocity, and Iran has attacked at least five other countries in the Middle East. Now, as the truce dissolves into renewed bloodshed, the US president faces a crucial decision.
Will he try to save the ceasefire by stamping out the conflagration that he ignited by attacking Iran on Feb 28? Or is the supposed truce merely a cover for a unilateral American withdrawal from this war?
If the former, then Trump and his emissaries will have to perform an extraordinary feat of diplomacy. If the latter, then he will be leaving behind the blaze that he started, while also accepting the new reality of Iran’s de facto control of the Strait of Hormuz, which could allow the regime to emerge stronger than before the war.
Assuming that Trump wants to preserve the ceasefire, he has a fiendishly complex repair job on his hands. First, there is the question of whether the original truce covered Lebanon, where Israel and Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed terrorist movement, have been locked in combat since March 2. JD Vance, the vice president, has insisted that it never did, and any impression to the contrary was an “honest misunderstanding”.
The problem is that Shehbaz Sharif, the Pakistani prime minister and mediator between Iran and America, issued a statement early on Wednesday saying: “I am pleased to announce that the Islamic Republic of Iran and the United States of America, along with their allies, have agreed to a ceasefire everywhere, including Lebanon.”
That wording is unambiguous, and the reference to “allies” might reasonably be taken to include Israel. Yet no sooner had the ceasefire been announced than Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, declared that Lebanon was not covered. On Wednesday, Israel struck 100 targets in Beirut in the space of 10 minutes.
That led Abbas Araghchi, the Iranian foreign minister, to say that America would have to “choose” between the “ceasefire or continued war via Israel”.
If Trump is serious about saving the truce, he will have to stop Netanyahu from attacking Hezbollah in Lebanon. That, in turn, would require Iran to prevent its terrorist ally from launching rockets at Israel.
Threading that particular needle – grimly familiar to diplomats in the Middle East – would be an extraordinary challenge in itself. This fact was underlined on Thursday when Netanyahu said: “We will continue to strike Hezbollah wherever necessary, until we restore full security to the residents of the north [of Israel].”
And there is yet another axis of this conflict – Iran’s strikes on its Gulf neighbours. Those attacks continued on Wednesday when Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates all reported incoming Iranian drones or ballistic missiles.
So far, the only effect of the ceasefire has been to halt American and Israeli air raids on Iran. The other two axes of conflict – between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon, and between Iran and its neighbours in the Gulf – are raging as before, or even more intensely in Lebanon.
Will Trump be willing to invest the time and diplomatic capital required to quell these fires? If Iran carries on ignoring the truce and enforcing its closure of the Strait of Hormuz, that could require America to go back to war and resume its air campaign.
Or might Trump choose the second option and walk away, using the largely theoretical ceasefire as cover?
If so, he will immediately encounter at least two risks. First, abandoning the scene would mean leaving Iran as de facto master of the Strait, with all the strategic and financial benefits for the regime that must flow from that reality. If Trump decides that he is content with that outcome, then the perception will be that America has lost the war.
The second risk of turning away is that the Gulf states might conclude that they are on their own against Iranian attacks. Saudi Arabia and the UAE, which both have formidable air forces, could decide they have no choice except to retaliate directly against Iran, escalating the war across the Gulf and risking yet more turmoil on global energy markets.
For now, Vance is still expected to meet Iranian representatives in Pakistan on Saturday, suggesting that Trump remains engaged in trying to salvage the ceasefire and reach a final peace agreement with the Islamic Republic. Whether he has enough political will for the task will soon be obvious.