Trump won the war against Iran; then the ceasefires lost it

Opposing the intervention is fair, but those who negotiated the ceasefires cannot dodge blame for a truce that turned military victory into a strategic collapse.

By Pierre Rehov, Gatestone Institute

The day after the November 3 midterm elections, Vice President JD Vance delivered his verdict on the war against Iran, which has been—and still is—waging a 47-year war on the United States, Israel, South America, Europe, and the Gulf States.

Iran was reportedly “a week away” from being able to threaten them with nuclear weapons.

“The reason we lost,” Vance wrote on X, “is the war.”

No, the reason the administration lost the midterm elections is not the war.

The war is possibly the reason that Riyadh, Washington, Buenos Aires, Tel Aviv, and Berlin are not either cinders or targets of nuclear blackmail threats—a minor detail Vance left out.

Trump had already answered the night before. “I did the right thing. I would have done it again,” he said, adding on November 4, “They’re not going to have a nuclear weapon.”

Vance’s comments raise a question of far greater consequence.

Was the decision to strike Iran a mistake, as he now suggests, or did the real failure lie in the succession of truces and postponements and opposition—largely created by Vance himself—that allowed a militarily defeated regime to survive and even claim victory?

Did the United States win the war in Iran only to lose it at the negotiating table?

Trump’s position on Iran has been clear for years.

For more than a decade, Trump had been warning that a nuclear-armed Iran would hold Israel and the Gulf monarchies hostage to atomic blackmail wielded by the “world’s top state sponsor of terrorism for the 39th year in a row.”

Trump withdrew from Obama’s Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, which was due to “sunset” in October 2025 anyhow, providing Iran with unlimited, legitimate, nuclear weapons.

In June 2025, Trump’s Operation Midnight Hammer sent B-2 bombers against Fordow and Natanz, while submarine-launched Tomahawks struck Isfahan, producing severe damage to all three sites.

On February 28, 2026, the United States and Israel went further. Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was killed in the opening strikes, along with much of the regime’s military leadership.

A war machine posing as a theocracy—one that chanted “Death to America” for nearly half a century—discovered what American power could do.

The alternative, a regime crossing the nuclear threshold under the protection of its missiles and proxies, would have posed a danger incomparably greater than anything the war has cost.

The trouble began when the guns were supposed to finish the job.

Little more than a week after his father’s death, Mojtaba Khamenei was named Iran’s new “Supreme Leader,” and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), battered but intact, adopted the only strategy they knew: holding the Strait of Hormuz hostage in order to outlast Trump’s term in office.

Trump answered with ultimatums of rare ferocity. In March he gave Tehran 48 hours to reopen the Strait or see its power plants “obliterated.”

Then he extended the deadline twice—understoodly viewed by Iran as two “blinks.”

The ultimatum of April 7, which warned that an “entire civilization” would perish, ended hours before its own deadline in a two-week truce requested by Pakistan’s prime minister and its army chief.

Six weeks later, a strike scheduled for the following day was postponed at the request of the rulers of Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates.

In August, planned weekend strikes were called off after a telephone call from Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman—whose own defense minister had warned in January that failing to strike would only embolden Iran’s regime.

By October, Trump was promising that no attack would come before the November midterm elections. Washington presented every pause as a gesture toward peace, but Tehran drew the obvious conclusion that the US had been neutered.

Between those postponements came the diplomacy, and with it Vance.

By April, Iranian officials had quietly sought to negotiate with Vance, whom they seem to have regarded, correctly, as one of the most anti-war figures in Trump’s inner circle and therefore the American most likely to settle.

A regime under bombardment selecting its preferred interlocutor should have set off alarm bells in Washington. Sadly, it did not.

Vance led the Islamabad talks, which collapsed after 21 hours, before helping produce June’s capitulation to virtually all of Iran’s demands, the incompetent Islamabad Memorandum of Understanding, a framework he co-signed with Trump.

Under the 14-point text that American officials read to reporters, Washington undertook to lift its naval blockade and to impose no new sanctions.

Treasury waivers would allow Iranian oil exports to flow, frozen assets would be made available under the framework, and the United States even undertook, with its regional partners, to develop a reconstruction plan worth at least $300 billion for the Islamic Republic, subject to a final deal.

The nuclear question that had justified the war was deferred to a final agreement, with Tehran merely committing to freeze its program in place.

In return, Iran promised its “best efforts” to arrange toll-free passage through Hormuz for 60 days only, in a waterway it had no right to obstruct at all.

The results are visible today. The June framework did not survive the summer, and the IRGC still claims to blow up tankers that stray from the routes they “authorize.”

On November 5, they reported fires aboard two tankers and a tugboat.

Kharg Island, through which roughly 90 percent of Iran’s oil exports pass, was spared in March, with Trump warning that he would “immediately reconsider” his actions if shipping were obstructed.

Shipping was indeed obstructed, but the June framework answered with waivers for Iranian oil.

Americans paid an average of about $4.15 a gallon for gas on election day, the highest ever recorded for an election day, and that economic pain was compounded by a stalemate the ceasefires prolonged.

That is the record Vance now leaves out of his indictment. The man who blames “the war” was the same man who led the negotiations not to have one—and that gave Iran its reprieve and the framework that rewarded it.

By early September, he was also among the senior aides, Marco Rubio included, pushing to keep the conflict “quiet” until November.

In the same post, Vance listed “change our relationship to Israel” among the lessons to be drawn from the midterm meltdown.

It is a grievance that owes nothing to gasoline prices or to the relative pittance of military aid that the US supplies to Israel each year, mainly to help Israel purchase US military hardware.

Vance is entitled to believe that the intervention was a mistake, but those who promoted and negotiated the ceasefires cannot take credit for opposing the war while escaping responsibility for a truce that turned a military victory into an open-ended collapse.

Where would Trump stand today had he carried out the threats he issued in March and April?

Had the power plants he promised to obliterate gone dark, had Kharg Island and land routes been closed to the regime’s oil exports, and had the naval forces of the IRGC been destroyed before they could mine Hormuz, Tehran’s strategy of attrition would most likely have been destroyed within weeks, long before the November calendar could come to its rescue.

Oil prices would have spiked, as they did anyway, but a short shock followed by a reopened Strait would have cost Americans far less than the chronic disruption of tankers being set ablaze.

A regime that drowned mass protests in blood in January, killing tens of thousands, would have faced its own people without much of the machinery of terror that keeps it in power.

Nothing guarantees that Iran’s theocratic dictatorship would have fallen—the risks were real. There could have been retaliation by Iran against Gulf states’ energy facilities, and there was a depletion of American munitions.

Yet the Gulf monarchies that pleaded for restraint now live beside a wounded and vengeful Iranian regime that still targets their oil facilities and airports and still controls the strait through which their oil must pass. Israel still faces an adversary whose nuclear file remains open.

Trump’s instinct in February was sound. Every pause granted since then to a mediator or an ally has eroded the advantage that instinct had won.

The United States has not been defeated on the battlefield, where its superiority was never in doubt. Instead, each truce has handed part of that victory back to Tehran.

Iran’s rulers are counting on Washington to accept their survival as the price of peace and in time to do what their armed forces could not—with the help of Russia and China—to rebuild their nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs and once again attack their neighbors in the region—and potentially the United States.

Trump still has two years and the instruments to finish what he began, starting with the economic strangulation and especially the military elimination of the IRGC—along with demands for the verifiable dismantlement of Iran’s nuclear program, backed this time by threats that are actually carried out.

Should Trump settle for another ceasefire, the regime he came closer to destroying than any of his predecessors will present its survival as a victory over the most powerful nation on earth, and a war won in February will be remembered as one squandered in the pauses that followed.