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Opinion & Analysis · Iran War 2026
The critics were loud, they were everywhere, and now they owe us a correction — and a more serious conversation about what’s actually at stake.
April 7, 2026 Foreign Policy 6 min read
Breaking — April 7, 2026
Iran has accepted a two-week ceasefire brokered by Pakistan. Negotiations are set to begin Friday in Islamabad. The Strait of Hormuz will reopen for a period of two weeks as a goodwill gesture.
“Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.” — Mark Twain
You’ve heard the Twain line. It’s the perfect frame for what has just happened. For weeks, across cable news, podcasts, and social media, a chorus of voices told us with great confidence that President Trump was simply making up his conversations with Iranian leaders. That there were no negotiations. That he was lying, performing, or delusional. Rumors of his diplomatic credibility, they implied, were greatly exaggerated.
Well. There is now a ceasefire.
I want to be fair here. Some of those voices were well-meaning people with honest questions about whether the president was being straight with the American public. That’s a legitimate thing to ask. But a significant portion were doing something else entirely — scoring political points, feeding an anti-Trump narrative, or simply looking to find fault wherever they could. And neither group, it is worth noting, tends to issue corrections when the story moves on.
The accusations that didn’t hold up
Let’s go through the list, because it matters to be specific.
They said Trump was not prepared going into the conflict in terms of having a plan to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. The counterpoint to that criticism is the reality on the ground: reopening the Strait without boots on the ground or regime change is extraordinarily difficult. That’s not a failure of planning. That is the nature of the problem. The critics presented the difficulty as proof of incompetence. It was proof of how hard this actually is.
They said Trump started the war to boost his poll numbers. His poll numbers are worse now than at any point in his presidency. That argument is simply not true.
They said Israel pushed Trump into the war against Iran — that Netanyahu had manipulated him into a conflict America didn’t need. One question worth asking: did Israel also push Trump to pursue a ceasefire with the country that has spent 47 years promising to wipe it off the map? Because that is what just happened.
They said this was a war of choice — an unnecessary conflict initiated by American aggression. That framing conveniently ignores everything that led to this moment.
The threat that was always real
Iran’s nuclear weapons program. Its massive stockpile of ballistic missiles and drones. Its network of proxy forces — Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis — funded, armed, and directed from Tehran. The deaths, displacements, and destruction those proxies have caused across the region, affecting millions of people over decades. And most recently, October 7th — the deadliest single-day massacre of Jewish people since the Holocaust — which could not have happened without the support and strategic direction of the Islamic Republic, sitting safely in Tehran.
For years, America and Israel absorbed all of this. Finally, they said enough. And somehow, in the telling of certain media voices and political commentators, the people who finally said enough are the troublemakers.
On Trump’s style — and his results
I’ll be the first to acknowledge that Donald Trump is a colorful storyteller. He has a way of doing things that I don’t always agree with, and I have had genuine concerns and questions about specific decisions made over the past month of this conflict. That’s fair game. Honest criticism is valuable.
But there is a method to the madness, and the results speak. His predecessors were, in foreign policy terms, predictable to the point of being ineffective. Our adversaries did not fear them. Russia invaded Crimea under Barack Obama and then the rest of Ukraine under Joe Biden. Under Trump’s first term, Russia did not move. That is not a coincidence.
“Iran doesn’t seem to be susceptible to the art of the deal. President Donald Trump is desperate to sell the story that the Islamic Republic is ready to end the war. But there’s no public sign yet from Tehran that it’s poised to help him walk back a crisis.”— CNN Analysis, March 25, 2026
That was written less than two weeks ago. There is now a ceasefire. Tehran came to the table. The analysis was wrong — and it deserves to be noted as such, not because CNN is an enemy, but because accuracy matters when the stakes are this high.
The market timing accusation
“Trump’s critics are calling it Trump’s latest TACO — an acronym for ‘Trump Always Chickens Out.’ That’s difficult to prove, but the decision follows another undeniable Trump pattern: his announcements often seem conveniently tied to the open and close of financial markets.”— CNN Analysis, March 23, 2026
This is an example of the kind of framing that damages the public’s ability to think clearly about what is happening. It is not analysis. It is insinuation dressed as analysis. If Trump’s diplomacy produces a ceasefire, the market-timing conspiracy theory doesn’t age well. The “TACO” branding didn’t age well. And yet it was presented with the confidence of established fact.
The real cost of crying wolf
Here is the problem with spending weeks insisting that the President is making things up: you stop asking the more important questions. Are the threats from Iran real? What happens if the Strait of Hormuz stays closed for six months? What does a nuclear-armed Iran mean for its own people, for its neighbors — including Muslim-majority countries in the region — and for the global order? What is the human cost of 47 years of Iranian-sponsored proxy violence, and what is the cost of allowing it to continue?
Those are the questions that matter. Those are the questions our media and our commentators should be driving toward. Instead, too much of the conversation has been about whether Trump was lying on a particular Tuesday, which is a much easier story to tell and a much less important one.
We cannot afford to have partisan or agenda-motivated arguments that exist only to tear down the credibility of a president who is at war to stop the ambitions of a murderous regime. The stakes — for American security, for Israeli survival, for global energy markets, and for the people of Iran itself — are simply too high for that.
What comes next
A two-week ceasefire is not a peace deal. The negotiations in Islamabad will be difficult. Iran’s demands — guarantees against future attacks, sanctions relief, international recognition of its sovereignty over the Strait — are significant asks. The history of US-Iran diplomacy is not encouraging. And Israel, which did not start this conflict by accident, remains deeply skeptical that any deal is achievable or durable.
But something that was said to be impossible — direct engagement leading to a pause in hostilities — has happened. The voices who spent weeks insisting Trump was fabricating all of this now have a responsibility. Not just to update their analysis, but to refocus their attention on what actually matters: the very real, very consequential question of whether this ceasefire can hold, what a lasting deal looks like, and what it means for the world if it falls apart.
Less politics. More clarity. The moment demands it.
Sources: CNN, NPR, Axios, Al Jazeera, Wikipedia (2026 Iran War), Slate. All citations reflect reporting as of April 7, 2026.
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