The Limits of the Bombing Pause
As Mark Twain said, history doesn’t repeat itself but it often rhymes. We seem to be living in one of those times right now.
In May 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson temporarily halted the bombing of North Vietnam for six days. He later ordered additional pauses, including a 37-day suspension in December 1965, further bombing halts in 1968, and another extended pause in December 1972 to facilitate the Paris Peace Talks. Despite these efforts, the agreements reached in Paris did not ultimately prevent renewed fighting. In 1975, North Vietnamese forces launched their final offensive, captured Saigon, and reunified the country under communist rule, bringing the long Vietnam War to an end.
The Iranian regime needs only to survive to win this war. The president has assured them that they will.
President Trump has paused the bombing in Iran for two weeks to help the peace talks which, at this writing, have already failed. Bombing pauses to enable peace talks have failed in the past and there is no prospect of them succeeding now.
Mr. Trump has been too quick to declare that we have won the Iran war. We haven’t.
Iran had demanded a lot to begin the negotiations. Its demands included that frozen Iranian funds be released, that the U.S. fund a rebuilding of Iran’s infrastructure, that the Israeli action against Hizballah in Lebanon be stopped, that Iran be allowed to charge tolls for ships passing through the Strait, and several other things all of which are unacceptable to the United States.
Vice President J.D. Vance has reported to Mr. Trump that the Iranians would not concede their “right” to enrich uranium, so the talks fell apart as we knew they would. We should simply walk away and resume bombing. Which is what we did in Vietnam. The Vietnam bombing halts were a sign of weakness that the North Vietnamese capitalized on. The Iranians will do the same.
Before the talks, Iran was still prohibiting ships that don’t pay million-dollar tolls from passing through the Strait of Hormuz. Mr. Trump said on Truth Social that, “There are reports that Iran is charging fees to tankers going through the Hormuz Strait — They better not be and, if they are, they better stop now! President DONALD J. TRUMP.”
Now, the president has said that every ship that has paid a “toll” to Iran will be blockaded by U.S. naval forces.
The Strait of Hormuz has become the focus of the war. That is a huge mistake. Victory or defeat is the only focus we should have.
As this column has stated repeatedly, the only successful outcome of the war is the demise of the ayatollahs’ regime. Only then can we be assured of any peace with Iran. But the president has assured Iran that regime change is not our goal.
We knew that the negotiations will not produce any satisfactory result. Even if we succeed in reopening the Strait by forcing the Iranians to stop demanding tolls, the Iranians can close it again whenever they’d like. And they won’t give up their “right” to enrich uranium to nuclear weapons grade despite the fact that their efforts to do so were enormously damaged in our June 2025 B-2 raid.
Any deal the president makes with Iran will fail just as the bombing halts in Vietnam failed.
So where do we go from here?
We can resume our bombing campaign. The Iranians expect that we will. We should do it anyway and soon. There should be no further negotiations until a new regime replaces the old one.
But that would require the deployment of tens of thousands of U.S. troops and even then it might not work, as it didn’t in Iraq and Afghanistan. We should never attempt to invade Iran because the temptation to nation-build will be too great. Sacrificing tens of thousands of American lives isn’t worth any attempt at nation-building which will fail in any event.
The ayatollahs’ regime will never live up to their obligations of any deal. We know that because they have never lived up to any negotiated deal, especially former president Obama’s 2015 “Joint Cooperative Plan of Action.”
The UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency was put in charge of inspecting Iran’s nuclear weapons efforts. But they weren’t allowed into the Iranians’ most secret locations where they continued to enrich uranium. Any deal the president makes must include American inspectors going to any site they deem necessary. Iran won’t agree to that. And any nuclear deal with Iran has to pass congressional approval which won’t happen either.
The Iranian regime needs only to survive to win this war. The president has assured them that they will. All we can do is to prepare for the next round of conflict with Iran which, we must hope, will come before they achieve nuclear weapons.
READ MORE from Jed Babbin:
The Illusion of Victory: Trump, Iran, and the Limits of Military Power
Cortes’s Misread of the Ukrainian Conflict
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