Trump Called the Ayatollah’s Bluff

And it seems to have worked, so far.

On paper, if I told you how Monday started, you probably wouldn’t have been able to guess how Monday ended.

At around 12:30 p.m. Eastern Time, Iran attacked an American air base in Qatar, in retaliation for the historic U.S. bombing of three Iranian nuclear sites over the weekend.

Al Udeid Air Base, which Iran attacked, is home to 10,000 U.S. troops. It’s the largest American military presence in the Middle East and the regional headquarters of the U.S. Central Command. Only a few weeks ago, President Trump himself was at the base (ironically, using his speech to tout diplomatic efforts with Iran that yesterday morning seemed on ice).

So how did we get to a place, by 4 p.m., where Trump was thanking Iran for the attack? (I bet that’s a sentence you didn’t think you’d read a week ago.) And, by 6 p.m., where he was announcing an Israel-Iran ceasefire?

In short, because war is often performative. (Battles are literally fought in military “theaters,” after all.) In this case, everyone played their roles for their respective audiences, and now — after some kicking and screaming — they seem to have returned to their corners.

The first clue that Iran’s attack was designed to ratchet tensions lower, not higher, was the target they selected: Qatar is one of the Middle Eastern countries friendlier to Iran, a sign that the assault would be one intended more to send a message than to inflict actual damage. The next clue was the number of missiles used: 14, a carefully selected amount (as the Iranian government explained) meant to match the number of “bunker-buster” bombs used by the U.S. on Saturday. That showed that the attack was calibrated to match the American bombing, not go beyond it.

As more details came out, the symbolic nature of the Iranian attack became even clearer.

Iran reportedly gave advance notice to Qatar before launching the missiles — and even, through two diplomatic channels, to the Great Satan itself, the U.S. government. That allowed enough time for Qatar to close its airspace and for America to make preparations at its base, ensuring that no U.S. troops were killed or injured during the attack.

Although air sirens rang out in Bahrain and Kuwait amid rumors of potential attacks, the zero-casualty missile strike in Qatar ended up being the sum total of the Iranian response.

To use the escalation ladder designed by the Cold War-era strategist Herman Kahn (the real-life “Dr. Strangelove”), the U.S. bombing had brought the conflict with Iran to Rung #9 (“Dramatic Military Confrontation”), right on the edge of where Kahn believed nuclear war starts to become thinkable. The Iranian response seemed to be climbing down the ladder, to Rung #8 (“Harassing Acts of Violence”), a sign of de-escalation under pressure.

What’s the point of launching a missile strike that everyone knows was coordinated in advance to cause the minimum amount of damage?

Well, not everyone knows.

The Iranian government has implemented a near-complete internet blackout throughout its war with Israel, leaving its citizens with few information sources beyond the state-run television and radio stations. Conveniently, those same outlets reported that the Iranian attack had “destroyed” the U.S. base in Qatar, despite all evidence to the contrary. (Presumably, there was no mention of the notification given to the Americans through diplomatic channels.)

Those reports had their intended effect; Iranians took to the streets to celebrate the attack on a U.S. base, as captured in this photo published by Reuters:

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader of Iran, followed the missile strike by posting a provocative image on his Farsi-language X account of a burning American flag, clearly intended (like the attack itself) for domestic consumption. On his English-language account, no such image appeared; instead, all he posted there was a brief message saying the “the Iranian nation isn’t a nation that surrenders” (although, by all appearances, it had).

And so, everyone could walk away a winner (at least in their own telling). Israel had significantly hobbled an enemy state. The U.S. had pulled off a long-threatened show of force. And Iran was able to telegraph to its audience at home that it had stood up for itself with a (supposedly) fearsome attack.

Per CNN, after the Iranian strike, Trump called the emir of Qatar to ask for help winding down the conflict. Trump would work on the Israelis, he said; the president asked Qatar to work on the Iranians. Within a handful of hours, Trump announced on Truth Social that the two countries had agreed to a ceasefire.

Ever the master brander, Trump even shared that he had come up with a name for the conflict: “THE 12 DAY WAR.” A Republican lawmaker promptly nominated Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize, one of those establishment honors (like gracing the cover of Time magazine) that this anti-establishment figure has long coveted.

“CONGRATULATIONS WORLD, IT’S TIME FOR PEACE!” Trump posted.

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The congratulations ended up being a tad premature.

Just as the ceasefire was about to take effect last night, Israel accused Iran of violating the agreement with a last-minute missile strike that killed at least four people. Iran denied violating the terms of the deal, but Israel threatened to retaliate.

Trump, speaking to reporters this morning, seemed frustrated that his hard-won truce appeared to be in question. “We basically have two countries that have been fighting so long and so hard that they don’t know what the fuck they’re doing,” he said. (You can watch that somewhat rare use of presidential profanity for yourself at 5:24 in the video below.)

“ISRAEL. DO NOT DROP THOSE BOMBS. IF YOU DO IT IS A MAJOR VIOLATION. BRING YOUR PILOTS HOME, NOW!” Trump wrote on Truth Social, where he has narrated much of the conflict. He reportedly echoed that message in a call with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who ended up launching a mostly symbolic response of his own, attacking a radar system outside Tehran. Under pressure from the president, Netanyahu agreed to scale back his initial retaliation plan, which had been to strike a larger number of targets, including inside the Iranian capital.

Clearly, then, the peace is fragile but — for the moment — it seems to be holding. (It will be up to future historians to decide whether the conflict will have to be called the “13-day war,” against Trump’s wishes, to account for the extra hours of hostilities.) Many questions remain, including around the future of Iran’s nuclear program and of Israel’s war in Gaza.

But, even while acknowledging that developments could quickly shift, it’s worth taking a step back and taking stock of the last 72 hours.

Each of the last four presidents — George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and first-term Donald Trump — contemplated striking the exact Iranian nuclear sites that Trump attacked last weekend, but ultimately pulled back, partially out of fear that an aggressive Iranian response would spiral into a broader regional conflict.

In fairness, those presidents weren’t dealing with an Iran as hobbled as Trump is now, after an onslaught of Israeli attacks that picked off many of its top commanders and eliminated its air defenses over the last two weeks, while also significantly weakening the militia groups in its “Axis of Resistance” — Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza, the Houthis in Yemen — over the last two years.

But, still, as long as the fragile ceasefire holds (no sure thing), the fact remains: Trump took a gamble that each of his predecessors declined to take, and has so far paid only a superficial price for it, in the form of the symbolic strike on the Qatar base. (If that can even be called a price.) Iran had long promised that a U.S. bombing on its territory would be met with harsh retaliation. Trump called the ayatollah’s bluff.

And not for the first time: in 2020, after Trump ordered the assassination of the top Iranian general Qasem Soleimani, Iran’s response strikes against U.S. bases were also viewed as relatively muted and similarly included giving advance notice to the country hosting the Americans. (That assassination, as a sidenote, also helped pave the way for Tehran’s current weakness: Iran’s proxy forces, which Soleimani oversaw, “never fully recovered from his loss,” as the New York Times reported.)

The political gamble Trump took this time was even larger, not just because the action in question was more dramatic — bombing Iranian territory for the first time in U.S. history, a step beyond the 2020 attack, a drone strike while Soleimani was in Iraq — but also because Trump, to an even greater degree than in 2016, campaigned so heavily in 2024 on the idea that he would avoid foreign conflict.

“We will measure our success not only by the battles we win but also by the wars that we end — and perhaps most importantly, the wars we never get into,” Trump said about his second term in his January inaugural address. “My proudest legacy will be that of a peacemaker and a unifier.”

Trump’s move on Saturday can be understood as (so far, successfully) risking his claim to those labels — but if you were confused because you thought those descriptors were the sum total of Trump’s governing philosophy, you haven’t been paying attention.

Instead, the best way to understand Trump’s impulses came this morning, in a comment that has been mostly overshadowed by the presidential F-bomb that came a few minutes later. “All I do is play both sides,” he told reporters.

Reliably, Trump’s biggest asset in political and diplomatic negotiations is his lack of enduring commitments. (Whether that betrays a lack of principles, or merely a refusal to cling to dogma, is in the eye of the beholder.) Over the last 72 hours, Trump showed this in at least two ways, which allowed him to seemingly pull off a long-feared gamble with both his political coalition and global stability intact.

Domestically, Trump threw a bone both to the war hawks and isolationists in his party, by executing a dramatic military strike and then immediately pivoting to ceasefire talks. That ought to quiet down the unusually-critical-of-late Marjorie Taylor Greenes of the world, while also pleasing the Mark Levins. (Although it was amusing to watch the combatants on both sides of the MAGA civil war carry on the fighting, like the Japanese soldiers who fought World War II into the ’70s. Lindsey Graham, for example, tweeted minutes after the Iranian strike in Qatar: “Mr. President: It’s time to end this madness in Iran.” Apparently, he didn’t get the message that Trump’s hawkish phase had ended and the dovish phase had begun.)

And, internationally, Trump betrayed unusual (for a U.S. president) willingness to make concessions to an American adversary while also exerting pressure on an American ally, signaling a willingness to negotiate with Iran and a need for Israel to wrap up its attacks immediately. Joe Biden may have used profanity to talk about Netanyahu behind the scenes, but it’s hard to imagine any other president dropping an F-bomb to express frustration with America’s top ally in the Middle East in public, just as it’s hard to imagine another president who’d be willing to write “God bless Iran” on social media. (In fairness, Trump’s political situation — specifically, the enormous amount of leeway given to him by the American right — allows him to say things about Israel, and Iran, that would have led to Biden being pummeled with criticism.)

Just like Iran with its strike on Monday, Trump put on a show for his intended audiences, trying to please them all at once. A president who wouldn’t (or couldn’t, for ideological or electoral reasons) exercise such dexterity might have been locking themselves into a larger conflict after the initial bombing. By playing both sides — willing to use military force, but also to negotiate; to bolster Israeli ambitions, but also to constrain them — Trump’s flexibility has once again allowed him to dance into a situation that other presidents didn’t want to touch with a 10-foot pole, and then to wriggle out of it.

For now. It’s early days yet, of course. Trump’s gamble seems to be paying off in the short term, but — as he learned himself this morning — in the Middle East, even seeming victories have ways of quickly growing complicated.