Those close to Donald Trump are concerned the president is prematurely declaring that the U.S. has come out on top in the Iran war.
Following the announcement of a two-week ceasefire deal, the 79-year-old president declared a “total and complete victory” in his deeply unpopular Middle East conflict, with several other administration officials also lining up to praise the deal.
However, the ceasefire already looks shaky, and U.S. officials fear that the president may have overstated its success.
Not only has Iran strengthened its control of the Strait of Hormuz—including weighing whether to charge ships a toll to pass through the vital passageway—but there are fears the five-week war has not done enough to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear bomb, multiple officials told The Wall Street Journal.
The reopening of the Strait of Hormuz shipping route, through which one-fifth of the world’s oil supply passes, was key to the ceasefire deal.
Two days after the ceasefire was announced, though, the waterway is still essentially closed, with the Journal reporting that Tehran is warning any ships that try to pass without Iran’s permission will be “destroyed.”
Iran has also claimed Israel’s Wednesday attacks on the Iran-backed military group Hezbollah in Lebanon violated the ceasefire agreement. Iran was still firing ballistic missiles across the Middle East even after Trump’s proposed two-week ceasefire had been agreed to.
“My number one concern right now is to see over the next four to six weeks whether we lied to ourselves because we lost our nerve, or whether we got a real agreement with real teeth that involves real change,” former House Speaker and Trump ally Newt Gingrich told the Journal.
There are also concerns that while the U.S. has heavily depleted Iran’s military and nuclear capabilities, the Middle Eastern country still possesses enough of an arsenal to seriously threaten the ceasefire deal.
“It’s a variant of the ‘d’ word,” Behnam Ben Taleblu, senior director of the Iran program at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told the Journal. “Iran has certainly been defanged, the regime’s capabilities have been degraded, but there’s a smaller group of things that have been fully destroyed.”
Even Trump himself seems willing to tear up the ceasefire deal he is so eagerly hyping. In a typically deranged late-night Truth Social post, Trump said that military munitions and equipment, which can be used in the “destruction” of Iran, will “remain in place in, and around, Iran, until such time as the REAL AGREEMENT reached is fully complied with.”
“If for any reason it is not, which is highly unlikely, then the ‘Shootin’ Starts,’ bigger, and better, and stronger than anyone has ever seen before,” Trump added.
There are rising calls to remove Trump via the 25th Amendment because of his dangerous threats toward Iran, which included a warning that a “whole civilization will die tonight” if a deal was not agreed upon before his Tuesday night deadline.
In a statement, White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly said: “Iran’s ballistic missiles are destroyed, their production facilities are demolished, their navy is underwater, their proxies are weakened, and their dreams of possessing a nuclear weapon are gone.”
“Now, the administration is engaging in diplomatic discussions because the President was able to exert maximum leverage over the Iranian regime, and he is optimistic that this will lead to long-term peace in the region.”
The Daily Beast has contacted the White House for further comment.
