by Roger Kimball
Trump may delay, Congress may posture, and Iran may stall—but the endgame remains the same: finish the job or repeat the failures of Obama and Biden.
I am out on a limb. The clock is ticking. On Wednesday, I wrote in my new Substack column that I thought it unlikely that “the ‘negotiations’ or (to describe what is happening more accurately) the grandstanding and playing for time by Iran will not result in an affidavit of surrender that is acceptable to President Trump.”
If that is the case, and given that the U.S. Senate is making noises about enacting a War Powers resolution aimed at “forcing Donald Trump to end the war in Iran unless he receives congressional authorization to continue it,” I suspect that hostilities will resume quite soon. Today is Wednesday. The next sleepy news day is likely Friday, May 22. Look for the short, sharp shock then or over the weekend.
Friday has come and gone. Do I feel like revising the timetable or even adjusting my prediction that hostilities will resume?
As to the first, not really. It’s Memorial Day weekend here in the States, which means that it is a long weekend. If something kinetic (I love that Greek-inspired euphemism) is going to happen in the near term, I believe that it will happen now, taking “now” in the generous sense we all accord to historical happenings.
There are both intrinsic and what we might call extrinsic reasons for this.
The intrinsic reasons include the fact that the replenishment of U.S. forces in the area is basically complete. Men and matériel are both at the ready. Too long a wait risks dulling the edge of readiness. Then too, the ceasefire has given Iran time to catch its breath, dig out and deploy its remaining drones and missiles, and resume its antic threats and posturing.
In short, as Shakespeare has Brutus observe before the Battle of Philippi,
The enemy increaseth every day;
We, at the height, are ready to decline.
There is a tide in the affairs of men,
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat;
And we must take the current when it serves,
Or lose our ventures.
When it comes to the extrinsic factors impinging on the president’s deliberations, most of them can be filed in the dossier marked “politics.” The conflict with Iran is not broadly popular. In part, this is because it was undertaken by Donald Trump and is, therefore, for a certain portion of the populace, most of the media, and for all of the Democrat party, by definition illegitimate.
There is also the issue of the cost of oil, which means the cost of energy, which includes the cost of gasoline. Voters do not like it when those costs rise. It’s getting towards the end of May now. The cost of oil must come down soon, or the situation will hurt Republicans, and therefore Donald Trump, in the midterm elections come November.
But maybe I need to rethink the entire scenario. Maybe, when push comes to shove (as it always does with Iran), Donald Trump will pull off a mask and reveal the ghastly rictus of Barack Obama or Joe Biden. That is to say, maybe President Trump will push back from the table and say, “We won. We’re going home. Iran can do as it likes.”
That contingency, as Jeeves would say, is remote.
Iran has just issued another in its seemingly endless series of proposals to bring the conflict to an end. This one is in two parts. Part 1: the U.S. declares that the war has ended and sets up a scheme to compensate Iran for the cost of the war. For its part, Iran would “provisionally” open the Strait of Hormuz.
Part 2: Iran wants full relief from the sanctions that America has imposed upon it and recognition of its formal right to enrich uranium. In exchange, Iran would agree to suspend enriching uranium above 3.6 percent for 10 years and would dilute any uranium already enriched above 20 percent. Iran would also commit to not developing a nuclear weapon.
What do you think of this proposal? I think that the chap who described it as “a bad joke” got it in one. “No serious American president,” he wrote, “—especially President Trump—would accept a deal that makes the JCPOA look brilliant by comparison.” Another commentator performed an admirable translation of Iran’s proposal into plain English:
1) The U.S. will give up all leverage
2) Iran will pretend to relinquish some leverage, while not actually doing so
3) Iran will then engage the U.S. in endless negotiations that never lead to any meaningful concessions
Do you believe Donald Trump will acquiesce to these terms? I don’t. On the contrary, the ultimatum the U.S. just issued to Iran demonstrates how far apart the two sides are. That ultimatum includes non-negotiable demands that Iran give up its 400 kilograms of enriched uranium and that its nuclear program shrink to one facility. It also denies absolutely any “reparations” for the cost of the war and refuses to unlock frozen Iranian assets.
Another tidbit to feed into the policy abacus: Donald Trump’s daughter Ivanka, it was just reported, was targeted by an IRGC-trained Iraqi terrorist called Mohammad Baqer Saad Dawood Al-Saadi. This lovable chap was arrested in Turkey on May 15 and extradited to the U.S. I reckon that was something President Trump thought about when he suddenly canceled his plans for Memorial Day weekend. He skipped his son’s wedding and his trip to his country club in Bedminster, New Jersey. Instead, he returned to Washington as the Pentagon put its staff on “moment’s notice” status, the National Security Council huddled with the president, and Iran started jamming GPS signals and closing its western airspace.
What’s the end game? President Trump vouchsafed the world a hint in a Truth Social post on Saturday. It’s a map of the Middle East showing Iran bedecked with the stars and stripes and emblazoned with the headline: “United States of the Middle East?” Later Saturday he announced that “An Agreement has been largely negotiated,” subject to review. All of which is to say that I stick by my original prediction. Donald Trump is not Barack Obama. One way or the other—through tough negotiation or by force—he will “finish the job.” He would prefer the former. If he wants a longstanding peace and a free Iran, he is likely to require the latter.
Photo: US President Donald Trump mimics firing a gun as he speaks about the conflict in Iran in the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room of the White House on April 6, 2026, in Washington, DC. (Photo by Kent Nishimura / AFP)
Roger Kimball is editor and publisher of The New Criterion and the president and publisher of Encounter Books. He is the author and editor of many books, including The Fortunes of Permanence: Culture and Anarchy in an Age of Amnesia (St. Augustine's Press), The Rape of the Masters (Encounter), Lives of the Mind: The Use and Abuse of Intelligence from Hegel to Wodehouse (Ivan R. Dee), and Art's Prospect: The Challenge of Tradition in an Age of Celebrity (Ivan R. Dee). Most recently, he edited and contributed to Where Next? Western Civilization at the Crossroads (Encounter) and contributed to Against the Great Reset: Eighteen Theses Contra the New World Order (Bombardier).
Source: https://amgreatness.com/2026/05/24/out-on-a-limb-but-unmoved-trump-will-finish-the-job-in-iran/
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