Will the U.S.-Iran war turn out to have been the 39-day war, following the locution of the 12-day Israel-Iran war of June 2025?

The markets, as this is written, seem to think so. Asian stock markets were up Wednesday morning after President Donald Trump’s ceasefire announcement and, hours later, so were European markets. U.S. markets had rebounded from initial losses on Tuesday.

The political marketplace was less steady. “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again,” Trump posted on Truth Social at 8:06 a.m. EDT Tuesday. “I don’t want that to happen,” he reassured readers, “but it probably will.”

It didn’t quite happen. At 6:32 p.m. EDT, just in time to make the old-line network evening newscasts, Trump announced “a double sided CEASEFIRE” on Truth Social. “Subject,” he went on, “to the Islamic Republic of Iran agreeing to the COMPLETE, IMMEDIATE, and SAFE OPENING of the Strait of Hormuz, I agree to suspend the bombing and attack of Iran for a period of two weeks.”

In all these dizzying threats and turnabouts, there are plenteous reverberations of events of the 1970s, which seem to have made a deep impression on the young commercial real-estate developer and reality-TV-star-to-be now in his second term as president.

One memory Trump’s postings evoked was that of Richard Nixon’s “madman” theory. Make adversaries afraid, he confided to aide Bob Haldeman and national security adviser Henry Kissinger, that your president is irrational and angry, that he may be on the brink of wielding America’s awesome power in destructive and unpredictable ways, so that the adversaries, full of dread, will do what he wants.

Of course, Nixon and his aides didn’t tell the public about this at the time. Indeed, the revelations of his Machiavellian maneuvering — yes, Machiavelli actually advocated feigning madness in his “Discourses on Livy” — and his coarse language most Americans in the 1970s found shocking.

In contrast, Trump proclaims his own negotiating moves in public in ALL CAPS and on his own app, and he employs language that the public in the 2020s has grown accustomed to from streaming series in which characters utter an implausible, apparently obligatory number of F-words per hour.

There’s no question that, as Trump was at pains to say, the military achieved most of its objectives. With astonishingly minimal losses and the astonishing retrieval of a downed pilot, the United States and its allies more than decimated the Iranian regime’s leadership, vastly reduced its supplies of and capacity to replenish weaponry, and vastly degraded, if not destroyed, its nuclear weapons programs.

But it was unable to restore the shipping lanes of the Strait of Hormuz, which allowed Iran’s rulers to impose costs on European allies, East Asian economies, and American voters. And the drawdowns on U.S. munitions supplies threatened to undermine the credibility of American deterrence in Asia: a concern for an administration whose national security strategy placed East Asia above the Middle East among its priorities.