NEW<\/span>You can now listen to Fox News articles!\n <\/p>\n<\/div>\n I\u2019ve been telling anyone who would listen \u2013 yes. I can get rather tiresome \u2013 that President Donald Trump<\/a> would not bomb Iran back to the Stone Ages.<\/p>\n Even after he said he would destroy Iran\u2019s civilization<\/a> and it would never recover, I knew that he would never go through with it. That was the last thing he wanted to do.<\/p>\n So I was confident he would find some kind of last-minute off-ramp.<\/p>\n And, of course, he didn\u2019t want to be seen as backing off his increasingly dire threats.<\/p>\n WHY TRUMP\u2019S WAR SPEECH FAILED: DECLARING VICTORY BUT STILL BOMBING IRAN BACK TO THE \u2018STONE AGES\u2019<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n It seemed pretty apparent that President Donald Trump wasn’t going to follow through on his most recent threats to relentlessly bomb Iran.<\/span> (Nathan Howard\/Getty Images)<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n I got the White House email at 6:32 Tuesday night. There it was, another delay, after a series of earlier delays. He would give the Iranians two more weeks.<\/p>\n I started posting like crazy, beating television by a couple of minutes, and newspapers by more. But that\u2019s just because my phone happened to be right there. If I\u2019d gone to the fridge for a moment, I would have come back to my laptop and discovered that the world had changed.\u00a0<\/p>\n I knew in my gut, having covered Trump for 35 years, that he did not want to go down in history as the man who wiped out an ancient civilization. His heart was never in that. It was bluster as a negotiating tactic.\u00a0<\/p>\n TRUMP FIGHTING FIERCE BATTLES, AT HOME AND ABROAD: WHY HE CASUALLY DISMISSES THE CONSEQUENCES<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n Still, he had boxed himself into a corner. Former allies in conservative media were denouncing him. “This is a brazen pre-admission of genocide against the Iranian people, which would obviously be a war crime. Madness,” Piers Morgan declared..<\/p>\n Some Republican lawmakers said he had gone too far. Even the U.S. Catholic Bishops<\/a> said “the threat of destroying a whole civilization and the intentional targeting of civilian infrastructure cannot be morally justified.”\u00a0<\/p>\n No American president had ever uttered such words.<\/p>\n Trump previously issued an expletive-laced warning to Tehran, urging them to reopen the Strait of Hormuz.<\/span> (Benoit Tessier\/Reuters)<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n So I figured the only card that Trump had left to play was delay. And that\u2019s precisely what he did. At the request of Pakistan, which has been the intermediary in the so-called talks, the president agreed to a pause in the hostilities.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n That is, according to the statement I received, “subject 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. This will be a double sided CEASEFIRE! The reason for doing so is that we have already met and exceeded all Military objectives\u2026”<\/p>\n It\u2019s a shaky cease-fire, to be sure, with Iran launching missiles at Israel minutes\u00a0 after it was announced, and Israel saying its ground invasion of Lebanon, after rocket fire from Iranian proxy Hezbollah, isn\u2019t covered.<\/p>\n WHY TRUMP, IRAN SEEM LIGHT-YEARS APART ON ANY POSSIBLE DEAL TO END THE WAR<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n By yesterday, in fact, as The AP confirmed, Iran\u2019s state media said it had closed\u00a0 Hormuz again, citing the Israeli attacks.<\/p>\n Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said in a posting that the Trump administration “must choose between a ceasefire or continued war via Israel, and “it cannot have both.”<\/p>\n We learned from New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan that Bibi Netanyahu<\/a> talked Trump into the war by saying it would be quick and topple the regime. Gen. Dan Caine, the Joint Chiefs chairman, called that “farcical.” Marco Rubio said it was BS. JD Vance was against the war.<\/p>\n And that\u2019s a fascinating sidebar. Trump has been insulting Haberman, who published a biography of him in 2022, for no apparent reason. Yet he granted an hourlong Oval Office interview for their forthcoming book, “Regime Change,” from which the Times piece was excerpted.<\/p>\n As for the president\u2019s current stance, well, he isn\u2019t being held back by murky details. He told Sky News this was a “complete victory,” not just in military terms but “in every other sense as well.”<\/p>\n Trump was on the phone with Fox opinion host Laura Ingraham shortly before she came on the air, and she quoted him as being “cautiously optimistic,” saying: “It sure looks like Iran blinked.”<\/p>\n What, peering through the fog of war, did Trump actually accomplish, other than sending the markets soaring by nearly 3 percent?<\/p>\n On yesterday\u2019s “Fox & Friends,” usually a Trump-friendly show, co-host Lawrence Jones said “we have not reached any of these objectives.”\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Dismantling nuclear facilities (“that has not happened”), ending uranium enrichment (“they are still enriching”), transferring uranium stockpiles out of Iran (“that hasn\u2019t happened”), accepting international inspections (“they are still not willing to do it”), and suspending the ballistic missile program (“they\u2019re still firing them off”). Jones also criticized Iran for proposals that would never be accepted by the U.S. side.<\/p>\n WHY TRUMP FACES AN AGONIZING DECISION ON OBLITERATING IRAN\u2019S OIL SUPPLY IF HE CAN\u2019T GET A DEAL<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n Fox anchor Harris Faulkner said yesterday, “this is the least ceasefire-like ceasefire I think that anybody might have anticipated.” Fox\u2019s chief foreign correspondent, Trey Yingst, said, “the Iranians don\u2019t appear very serious about this ceasefire agreement.”\u00a0<\/p>\n And therein lies the rub. The two countries remain far apart. This business about a strategic framework just papers that over in a devil\u2019s-in-the-details sense. Iran is never going to agree to give up its nuclear program, regardless of any presidential pronouncements or Mission Accomplished banners.<\/p>\n The Iranian pitch<\/a>, apparently not the one seen by Trump, says the U.S. must leave the region, give Iran sole control of the strait, and recognize its right to nuclear enrichment.<\/p>\n White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt called Iran\u2019s 10-point plan “fundamentally unserious, unacceptable and completely discarded.”\u00a0<\/span> (Saul Loeb\/AFP\/Getty Images)<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Don\u2019t take my word for it. Press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters yesterday that Iran\u2019s 10-point plan was “fundamentally unserious, unacceptable and completely discarded.”\u00a0<\/p>\n Look, if this somehow all works out, what most people will remember is that Trump made harsh threats that led to a deal in which the Iranian blockade \u2013 “Open the F—in\u2019 Strait, you crazy b——s” \u2013 was lifted. In other words, his Madman routine worked against the world\u2019s leading terror state, which has been killing Americans, Arabs and its own people for 47 years.\u00a0<\/p>\n But things could always fall apart faster than a speeding drone. It\u2019s the Middle East<\/a>.<\/p>\n No matter what you think of Trump, his war of choice, his apocalyptic rhetoric or his entire presidency, he\u2019s not crazy. He followed a similar path in his tariff crusade, threatening draconian levies before reaching 11th-hour compromises.\u00a0 As he himself says, he\u2019s a dealmaker. That\u2019s what he does.<\/p>\n![\"President](\"https:\/\/a57.foxnews.com\/static.foxnews.com\/foxnews.com\/content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/1200\/675\/trump-shrug.jpg?ve=1&tl=1\")
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