Trump has exposed the limits of his own powernewsline24

Critics of the US president will see the latest extension of a ceasefire with Iran as yet another “Taco” moment, because Trump Always Chickens Out.

But criticising Donald Trump for not behaving like a madman or an idiot is a sign that his critics are suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome.

Trump has threatened genocide against Iran when he said on social media that “tonight an entire civilisation will die”. Making such statements is criminal, and involves his armed forces in potential violations of international law.

For now, Trump has backed away from a more recent threat that, if Iran does not open the Strait of Hormuz and agree to a peace deal, “the whole country is going to get blown up”.

That may be an end state that Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, would favour, but the US-Israeli attacks on Iran, and Israel’s simultaneous war in Lebanon, have served to weaken both nations in the long term.

That the outcome of an attack by the US and Israel would be bad for – among others – the US and Israel was obvious to previous presidents George W Bush, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden. Which is why they rejected Netanyahu’s Oval Office pleas for the US to attack Iran.

Israel, which is now involved in smashing Lebanon, causing widespread civilian deaths and devastating infrastructure, is attracting worldwide condemnation for its efforts to destroy Hezbollah.

It is likely to end up occupying southern Lebanon, as it did from 1982 to 2000 – an occupation that Hezbollah was created to fight. So Israel will not have punched its way to security, but generated a reason for some of its neighbours to carry on fighting.

In Iran, Israel and the US have not seen the regime change that Netanyahu, indicted in 2024 for crimes against humanity in Gaza, pitched to Trump.

The result of the attacks on Iran’s regime and the killing of its supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is that the nation has gone into pre-planned resistance mode. The whole place is now being run like a massive partisan operation.

Iran’s nuclear capabilities have been set back by American and Israeli bunker busters. But the ambition to have nuclear weapons remains. Any nation that was ever worried about its future security and the reliability of its allies would be wise to start building nukes now.

Britain and France have an independent nuclear capability. Once seen as overly isolationist, that now looks smart. One of the consequences of Trump’s irrational air invasion of Iran has been to drive home to America’s allies that the US is dangerous, and that a unipolar world, in which Western nations depend on whoever runs the Oval Office for their security, locks them into a madhouse.

Europe, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, South Korea, even the UK now know that they need to race to build the kind of “medium power” alliances Canada’s prime minister Mark Carney foresaw as necessary at the last gathering of world leaders in Davos.

Iran’s capacity to hit back against military attacks by strangling the flow of fossil-fuel products through the Strait of Hormuz, which have driven up crude oil prices to around $100 (£74) a barrel from a pre-war $70, has enhanced the power of the theocracy in Tehran.

The US and Israel are being blamed, along with Iran, for economic shocks that have driven the UK’s inflation rate up to 3.3 per cent.

Trump’s campaign against green energy has been set back, too. In the UK, there has been a 50 per cent increase in domestic solar panel sales since the start of the war. He may be demanding that the UK drill more in the North Sea, but Britons seem to believe that free power that no one can turn off makes more sense.

In almost every arena, the standing of the US and Israel has been weakened. Their combined capacity for mass destruction has revealed that violence on a gigantic scale does not always achieve its ends.

The near-automatic support for Israel in the US, especially in politics, is being undermined by seismic shifts in polling, especially among younger voters.

According to a March 2026 survey by Pew, 70 per cent of Americans aged 18 to 29 have a negative view of Israel. More than two-thirds of those aged 30 to 49 share that point of view.

For Americans, the relationship with Israel is increasingly seen in a new light. For years they have been taught that it is a strategic asset in a roiling Middle East; now, it is coming to be regarded as a strategic liability that contributes to the mess that is the Middle East. This is not to ignore the responsibility of Iran’s regime for spreading chaos and violence over many decades.

The principal tragedy is that Iran now suffers from the twin nightmares of aerial attack and intensified oppression.

America’s tragedy is that Trump has exposed the limits of US power, which the Pentagon understood until he defenestrated all the generals and spies that could have warned him not to repeat Afghanistan and Iraq.

So now, Trump is taking stock and realising that this is a problem that the US has to talk, not fight, its way out of. The global tragedy is that Iran’s fanatics know that too, and will continue to bring chaos and derangement to the world.