Donald Trump’s ceasefire shows how America has changed

If Operation Epic Fury has truly ended, following the announcement of a two-week ceasefire on April 7th, it will have lasted nearly as long as Operation Desert Storm, the campaign to expel Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi forces from Kuwait in 1991. A comparison of the two wars shows how much America has changed.

Back then, President George H.W. Bush sought approval from Congress and the UN Security Council before opening fire. This time round, Donald Trump did not bother with such formalities. Bush, who died in 2018, patiently persuaded 41 other countries to join America’s military coalition. Mr Trump started the war with one ally, Israel. He did not consult other allies, but then demanded they help when things got hard, and denounced them as “COWARDS” when they proved reluctant.

The elder Bush laid out a clear, limited objective: reversing one country’s seizure of another. Mr Trump offered a shifting array of goals, from destroying Iran’s missiles and nuclear programme to regime change.

Bush, who did not have access to social media, chose his words carefully. His terse response to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990 was “This will not stand.” Mr Trump has been more verbose and less measured. “Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell—JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah,” he posted on Truth Social on April 5th.

The 41st president declared victory only after he had won, and in his victory address praised American soldiers and allies—but not himself. Mr Trump declared victory early and often. “We won. In the first hour it was over,” he boasted on March 11th. Despite being over in the first hour, it lasted nearly six more weeks, snuffed out hundreds of lives and made humanity measurably poorer.

On the morning of April 7th Mr Trump vowed to wipe out Iranian civilisation if the regime did not meet his terms. For ten and a half hours, the world wondered how seriously to take this astounding threat. Then he backed down, citing progress in negotiations. The next day he sounded cheerful. “This could be the Golden Age of the Middle East!!!” he posted on Truth Social, adding: “Big money will be made.”

The liberation of Kuwait from the Middle East’s most torture-happy despot marked a high point of American power—a unipolar moment after the end of the cold war. It also pushed Bush’s approval rating at home to nearly 90%. Democrats as well as Republicans applauded. Mr Trump’s war has been less well-received.

His supporters note that several of Iran’s bellicose leaders and much of its conventional arsenal have been destroyed. “Other presidents marked time and kicked the can down the road. President Trump made history,” said Pete Hegseth, the secretary of war. To avoid further battering, Iran has provisionally agreed to partially re-open the Strait of Hormuz, allowing vital oil and gas to flow again. Oil prices fell and stocks rose at the news.

Critics retort that the strait was only closed in the first place because of the war, and that Iran is now claiming the right to charge ships hefty tolls to pass through it. The Islamic regime still has its stocks of highly enriched uranium and a stronger incentive to pursue nuclear weapons. Mr Trump’s ceasefire is “a major strategic error founded on a false understanding of the Iranian government”, says Danielle Pletka of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a conservative think-tank.

America’s situation is “far worse” than it would have been, had Mr Trump never started the war, says Suzanne Maloney of the Brookings Institution, a non-partisan think-tank. “The Iranian regime is emboldened, the global economy is damaged, our munitions and interceptors are depleted and our allies are further alienated.”

The war has strengthened the sense that Mr Trump’s approach to geopolitics is neither competent nor benign. Again, the comparison with the 41st president is instructive. As a former director of the CIA, Bush carefully weighed the intelligence he heard. By contrast, when the current CIA director dismissed as “farcical” the rosy scenarios for quick and easy regime change that Israel’s prime minister had presented to Mr Trump, the president brushed aside the warning, according to the New York Times.

Bush, a decorated navy pilot who once completed a mission while his plane was on fire, took war seriously. He hoped that victory might help forge “a world where the United Nations [could] fulfil the historic vision of its founders” for peace. Mr Trump, who avoided the draft, has pivoted within hours from musing about war crimes (“we’re going to bring them back to the Stone Ages, where they belong”) to urging a boycott of Bruce Springsteen (who he said was “bad, and very boring [and] looks like a dried up prune”).

MAGA types hail Mr Trump’s over-the-top threats as a brilliant negotiating tactic. But the negotiations with Iran have far to go. The two sides are still oceans apart on issues such as Iran’s nuclear stockpile (Mr Hegseth suggests it should hand it all over to America) and the strait (Mr Trump has suggested that America should get a cut of the tolls, because “why shouldn’t we? We’re the winner”).

Democrats are using the word “unhinged” to describe Mr Trump’s wartime threats. Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia says they “show an increasing mental and moral instability”. But this argument may not sway many voters. Their views on Trumpian diplomacy depend more on partisan allegiance than on recent events. Even before the war, only 7% of Democrats were satisfied with America’s standing in the world, compared with 80% of Republicans, according to Gallup, a pollster.

Despite his triumph in the Gulf, Bush lost his bid for re-election the next year, thanks to a lacklustre economy. Mr Trump’s next electoral test comes in November at the midterms, which he has joked about cancelling. Judging by betting markets, the ceasefire has made little or no difference to his party’s odds of holding on to the House of Representatives (slender) or the Senate (50-50).

More will depend on how long it takes for the war’s effect on prices to ebb. Roger Pielke, also of AEI, estimates that it has been costing a typical American family $400 a month, by making fuel and fertiliser more expensive, among other things. Mr Trump has sometimes sounded blasé about such pocketbook worries. On April 3rd he proposed a budget that would raise defence spending by a colossal 40% and cut other areas. “It’s not possible for [the federal government] to take care of day care, Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things,” Mr Trump recently told a private audience, suggesting that the states should do more instead. “We have to take care of one thing,” he said. “We have to guard the country.” ■