David Sanger writes:

Just two weeks ago, opening the Great American State Fair, President Trump triumphantly declared: “For the first time in 3,000 years, we are going to have peace in the Middle East.”

It was typical bravado for Mr. Trump. But the “peace” he was celebrating — the cease-fire with Iran that on Wednesday he declared “over” after less than a month — was already beginning to unravel. The result was perhaps predictable for a 14-paragraph memorandum of understanding that skirted major issues and was hastily assembled so Mr. Trump could declare he had reached a deal, any deal.

Now Mr. Trump appears to be confronting the consequences of his haste, and of his assumption, born of his time in the real estate business, that his adversary would prize economic benefits over the revolutionary ideology that has driven its politics since the 1979 Iranian revolution. That has left him facing a range of unpalatable options amid seemingly intractable sticking points over the fate of Iran’s nuclear program — to say nothing of its missile program, its support for terrorist groups and its repression of its own people.

At the NATO summit in Ankara, Turkey, on Wednesday after the two sides had exchanged strikes, he threatened major new combat operations. Those included seizing a key Iranian oil processing island and attacking the country’s infrastructure and desalination plants, which experts have said could constitute a war crime. (Mr. Trump did say he was most hesitant to hit the desalination facilities.)

But Mr. Trump has made such threats without following through before, and he added on Wednesday that he did not anticipate a return to full-scale war. Such a move has little domestic support, and some of Mr. Trump’s Republican allies fear the economic and political consequences less than four months before the midterm elections. No one is more aware of that calendar, or Mr. Trump’s hesitation to repeat the experience of the spring, than the Iranian leadership. [Continue reading…]