It’s not clear who is crowing the loudest about the meaning of the two-week ceasefire between the United States and Iran that President Donald Trump announced on April 8. Both Tehran and the president’s domestic opponents seem equally determined to declare that it means the Islamist regime has won.
Their reasons for doing so are painfully obvious. But the pronouncements broadcast on the regime’s official media and those published on the home page of The New York Times about Iran’s government emerging triumphant from six weeks of war are, at best, premature, and at worst, utterly disingenuous spin. From the start of the war, the backers of the Islamist tyrants and those who oppose Trump have been heavily invested in the idea that the joint U.S.-Israeli campaign was a blunder that was doomed to failure.
Tehran isn’t winning
Characterizing a conflict during which Iran’s military capabilities, missiles and what’s left of its nuclear program were largely destroyed while it was able to inflict only minor damage to Israel or U.S. forces as a victory for Tehran seems a stretch under any circumstances. The Islamist government has been waging war on the West and the United States, as well as Israel, since it seized power in 1979. But it has suffered blows in the last year unlike anything it previously experienced. Even if the conflict were never to resume, the impact on the strategic equation in the Middle East of the devastation inflicted on Iran’s ability to threaten the world with its nuclear program, missiles or terrorism has been enormous.
Suffice it to say that Iran had gone a long way toward achieving its goal of regional hegemony on the eve of the Hamas-led Palestinian Arab terror attacks on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. Yet since that horrible day, the regime’s power and influence have been on a downward spiral. Its Hamas and Hezbollah terror proxies have been defeated and reduced to a fraction of their previous power to inflict pain on Israel while losing control of much of Gaza and Lebanon. The barbarous Bashar Assad regime in Syria, which was dependent on Tehran, has fallen. And the 12-day war in June 2025 and the six-week military campaign now on hold have done incalculable harm to Iran’s forces and weapons.
Still, it must be conceded that despite their tactical success, neither the United States nor Israel has achieved their strategic goals, which is to say, that the regime in Tehran is still standing, despite suffering military defeat and being deeply unpopular. Toppling the theocracy was not the immediate objective of either Washington or Jerusalem, but it was something that both Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have made clear they wanted. Making that happen was always going to be something that could only be accomplished by Iranians, who have repeatedly taken to the streets to protest their tyrants and were murdered in their tens of thousands for doing so this past January, rather than being imposed on the country by outside forces. Yet the very fact that the mullahs remain in power, however shaky their hold may be over a devastated nation and even though much of its leadership has been killed in targeted Israeli attacks, must be considered an accomplishment of sorts.
A rerun of the Suez Crisis?
More than that, Iranian threats to stop the flow of oil through the Straits of Hormuz created economic pain in the West and put pressure on Trump to stop the fighting. And it is this fact that gives the president’s critics a leg to stand on. If, as historian Niall Ferguson wrote in The Free Press, the Iran war turns into a replay of the 1956 Suez Crisis, then Iran really will have won.
In that conflict, Britain and France conspired, with the help of Israel, to wrest the Suez Canal from the government of Egyptian dictator Gamal Abdel Nasser, who had nationalized the vital waterway. The British-French assault on the northern end of the canal was a military success, as was Israel’s campaign routing Egyptian forces in Gaza and the Sinai.
The closing of the canal, however, created economic and political pressure on London and Paris to stand down. Worse, they had failed to consult their sole superpower ally, the United States. The administration of President Dwight Eisenhower took great umbrage at this perceived insult and a dim view of the expedition. At the time, Eisenhower and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles were still eager to continue their failed efforts to appease and woo Nasser away from Soviet influence.
Israel had participated in the war to stop the Egyptian-backed terror campaign emanating from the Gaza Strip and to secure its right of passage to the Red Sea from Eilat. Yet contrary to the myth about Jerusalem always being a recipient of American support, Eisenhower and Dulles were also less than friendly to Israel, and essentially adopted a stance of neutrality toward the Arab effort to destroy the fledgling Jewish state.
So, when Washington demanded that Britain and France back down and evacuate the Canal zone—and that Israel give back the Sinai peninsula and Gaza to Egypt—all three countries were forced to comply.
That was a political disaster for British Prime Minister Antony Eden, who was the driving force behind the attack, and he soon resigned. Beyond that, the outcome of the campaign was widely seen as the end of British efforts to maintain their status as a great power, even as they granted independence to the various nations that they had ruled as an empire on which the sun never set.
That is exactly what Iran and Trump’s critics would like to see happen now to the United States. And if the war with Iran concludes similarly, the analogy will hold. Either as a result of negotiations that are about to start or due to the administration simply accepting a new status quo in which the Islamist regime survives—and not only asserts control but a right to collect tolls in the Straits of Hormuz on oil tankers—then it will be a victory for Iran, and a terrible defeat for Trump and the United States.
Yet those trumpeting such doleful predictions need to remember a few main differences between the current war and the Suez crisis.
In 1956, Britain and France were declining nations, still crippled by the impact of the Second World War that had bankrupted the former in victory, and humiliated and impoverished the latter in defeat. Both were clinging to the vestiges of empire without the economic or military power to back up their pretensions. Neither had the ability to say “no” to Washington and back up their refusal. Needless to say, the same was true of an Israel that was, unlike today, a tiny nation without a strong military or economy, and that many believed would ultimately be destroyed by its hostile neighbors.
By contrast, the United States in 2026 is still the pre-eminent global superpower, even though its ability to impose its will around the world is not unlimited. And, other than Israel, it has few if any real allies.
Trump has good reason to fear the impact of the rise in the price of oil on the economy and the midterm elections in November. He clearly wants the war to be concluded before the start of summer, when hikes in the cost of gasoline at the pump could create a political problem for which he has no ready solution.
It’s equally true that Trump’s hyperbolic rhetorical threats aimed at Iran in the last six weeks—especially in the days leading up to the ceasefire, which few believed he would carry out—have also made the current situation look worse.
Of course, most of the negative commentary about the war has been primarily driven by partisan opposition to Trump more than anything else. The goal of destroying Iran’s ability to continue to threaten the West with nukes, missiles and terror remains an imperative for American national interests, as well as for maintaining stability in the Middle East and the international economy. Yet to those who hate Trump, defeating him is a much higher priority than stopping the ayatollahs.
The Iranians have been counting all along on opposition to the war from Democrats and Western European nations to help them to ultimately defeat Trump, notwithstanding the American military success. And, as Ferguson has noted, they may be looking to a different historical analogy as a path to victory. In that scenario, Tehran plans on remaining obdurate in negotiations with the Americans and—much like the North Vietnamese did in its peace talks with the United States from 1968 to 1972—winning by simply saying “no” to any agreement that would deny them the ability to gain the peace, despite being unable to succeed on the battlefield.
Underestimating Trump
What’s more, refusing to give an inch is also how they got former President Barack Obama to agree to the weak terms of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal that guaranteed the regime would eventually get a bomb, rather than preventing it.
Yet to assume that the president will give the Iranians the kind of victory that Obama and former Secretary of State John Kerry gave Iran—or that former President Richard Nixon and his Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, gave to the North Vietnamese—is to underestimate Trump.
The Iranian regime is simply incapable of making a deal that would end the war that would be remotely acceptable to Trump. A weak leader or one desperate for a deal at any price might weigh the economic pain that would result from continuing the war, and decide to cut and run. The administration’s conduct of the war has not been flawless, even if the military aspects have been. Having gone this far, it is possible that the president might give up and declare, as some of his predecessors have done, that a defeat was actually a victory.
But whatever else one may say about him and his unpresidential rhetoric and social media posts, Trump is not someone who is likely to make a deal simply for its own sake. He is neither the fool nor the coward that his opponents think he is. The notion that he will back down and grant his opponents a victory in this manner when the United States still has the military advantage goes against everything we know about him.
The Iranians may believe that they can afford to sustain enormous losses without making concessions because the West is weak. While that might be an accurate assessment of Western European governments or the United States under Obama or President Joe Biden, Trump went to war against Iran specifically because he is not that sort of leader.
The war isn’t over yet
Halting traffic in the Straits of Hormuz and attacking Arab states in the Persian Gulf to maximize their pain may be formidable cards in Tehran’s hands. But the fact that Iran is now virtually defenseless is one that America and Israel can play. Whether that means a ground campaign that would regain control of the Straits of Hormuz from Iran or not is unclear. As both countries have shown during the last six weeks, their ability to take out Iranian forces and their leaders is vast. And it might also be wrong to think that neither country is unable to go even further to undermine the Islamist regime if left with no alternative.
If the current set of leaders in Iran who replaced their slain predecessors thinks they are out of danger, they are mistaken. Their belief that the administration is too feckless or harried by domestic opponents to stick it out and insist on an outcome in which Iran gives up its nuclear ambitions, missile program and international terrorism requires a far greater leap of imagination than a prediction in which Trump waves the white flag. Those making such predictions are forgetting every previous decision that the president has made, as he continually refused to bend to Tehran’s will or yield to the demands of his political foes, whether on the right or the left.
The war on Iran has been paused, but it is not yet over.
The willingness of Washington, along with its faithful ally Israel, to use force to achieve the policy outcome that the American administrations of the last 30 years all demanded should have already convinced the Islamist regime that it faces very different adversaries than the ones they’ve previously bested in negotiations. Trump’s foreign-policy legacy depends on winning this war and not letting the regime that has been waging a jihad against the West for 47 years get the upper hand. We don’t know yet if, once the fighting does end, the president will gain a result that will leave Tehran unable to go on threatening the world. But if he doesn’t, it’s not likely to be because he was too worried about domestic critics or oil prices to stand his ground.
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS (Jewish News Syndicate). Follow him: @jonathans_tobin.
