Can we call it the Mojtaba Khamenei of ceasefires? If you know, you know.
Earlier today, Duane posited that Donald Trump had “finally tapped out” of the push to negotiate with the Iranian regime after receiving a formal response demanding our surrender, as well as “reparations” for the war. That turned out to be … mostly true. Trump scoffed at the response and warned that he will not get bored or distracted from his core purpose – to seize Iran’s highly enriched uranium, end their nuclear-weapons development, and restore access to international waters in the Strait of Hormuz.
Nonetheless, Trump still insisted that diplomacy could work, even if the ceasefire is “on life support”:
Trump on ceasefire with Iran: “It’s UNBELIEVABLY weak. I would call it the weakest right now after reading that piece of garbage they sent us. I didn’t even finish reading it. I said, I’m not going to waste my time reading it. It’s on life support.” pic.twitter.com/S7FiwTyoYE
— Open Source Intel (@Osint613) May 11, 2026
Trump rejected Iran’s latest proposal to end the war, decrying their terms — which he did not detail — as “stupid,” “totally unacceptable” and a “piece of garbage.”
“I would call [the ceasefire] the weakest right now, after reading that piece of garbage they sent us,” Trump told reporters at the White House on Monday. “I didn’t even finish reading it. … The ceasefire is on massive life support, where the doctor walks in and says ‘Sir, your loved one has an approximately 1 percent chance of living.’” …
However, Trump said that there is still room for a diplomatic solution between the two nations.
“It is very possible. I’ve had a deal with them four or five times,” Trump said. “They change their mind. They are very dishonorable people, the leadership.”
Ahem. The ceasefire is on life support to the same extent that Monty Python’s parrot is resting after a prolonged squawk. The agreement ceased to be at the moment that the IRGC reneged on the commitment to allow free passage through the Strait of Hormuz. In the intervening weeks, Iran has sent attack boats into international waters to harass shipping, shot missiles at Gulf states, struck the UAE’s oil-production facility in Fujairah, and claimed to annex those international waters permanently.
It also belies the obvious, which is that the diplomatic track has proven useless. Entirely useless, in fact. Iran won’t abide by its own agreements now, and this regime has not abided by agreements made with the West over the entirety of its 47-year existence. Trump’s point about the leadership is mistaken; the entire regime is “dishonorable,” and intentionally so. As I wrote earlier today:
There are no “moderates” in this regime. If there were, those factions would have flipped to lead a popular revolt against Vahidi’s military junta. Ghalibaf, Pezeshkian, and Vahidi all eat from the same rice bowl. The myth of regime “moderates” arose after the death of Ruhollah Khomeini, but regime moderates are the Sasquatches of Iranian policy in the West – much hypothesized but yet to have even one verified sighting.
What this means is that the “talks” through Pakistan were and would always be a colossal waste of time. Abbas Araghchi and Ghalibaf essentially ran a good cop/bad cop fraud, attempting to get concessions from Donald Trump rather than offer any themselves.
This isn’t a ceasefire, and it’s not a negotiation either. It’s a war with the heat turned down to something between a simmer and a boil. Pretending otherwise won’t make it more of a ceasefire. It only serves to delay an inevitable choice Trump has to make – to fish or cut bait.
Delay may be the point. Trump has a meeting with Xi Jinping in Beijing on Thursday, and although the White House has begun dialing down expectations for it, Trump probably doesn’t want to postpone it again. If he reinitiates Operation Epic Fury, Trump would have to push the meeting off again. By pretending that the ceasefire still pines for the fjords, Trump can hold off until the end of the week before taking action to deliver consequences for bad-faith negotiations.
He shouldn’t wait long to do so, though. The longer Trump waits to act, the stronger the defeatist clique within the West grows. The Atlantic has already surrendered in the war, claiming that Iran has “checkmated” Trump:
The risk calculus that forced Trump to back down a month ago still holds. Even if Trump were to carry out his threat to destroy Iran’s “civilization” through more bombing, Iran would still be able to launch many missiles and drones before its regime went down—assuming it did go down. Just a few successful strikes could cripple the region’s oil and gas infrastructure for years if not decades, throwing the world, and the United States, into a prolonged economic crisis. Even if Trump wanted to bomb Iran as part of an exit strategy—looking tough as a way of masking his retreat—he can’t do that without risking this catastrophe.
If this isn’t checkmate, it’s close. In recent days, Trump has reportedly asked the U.S. intelligence community to assess the consequences of simply declaring victory and walking away. You can’t blame him. Hoping for regime collapse is not much of a strategy, especially when the regime has already survived repeated military and economic pummeling. It could fall tomorrow, or six months from now, or not at all. Trump doesn’t have that much time to wait, as oil climbs toward $150 or even $200 a barrel, inflation rises, and global food and other commodity shortages kick in. He needs a faster resolution.
But any resolution other than America’s effective surrender holds enormous risks that Trump has not so far been willing to take.
We’ve lost after ten weeks, eh? That may sound absurd, but dithering for nearly half of that time while pretending to be preserving a ceasefire makes it look as though Trump might agree with that assessment. That strategy is as believable as insisting that a certain mullah is secretly running everything despite not once making a public appearance or putting forth a verifiable video or audio appearance in the middle of the war.
The attempts to sell the current status as a ceasefire are every bit as convincing as Michael Palin’s clerk in this classic sketch. Beautiful plumage, though.
Editor’s Note: Thanks to President Trump and his administration’s bold leadership, we are respected on the world stage, and our enemies are being put on notice.
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