Smoke rises following strikes on Tehran on April 7, 2026. AFP via Getty Images A great scholar of the Islamic world — Bernard Lewis — was once asked the main difference between the Islamist and Western mind. He replied that whereas we in the West think in two-year electoral cycles — four years at most — the Islamist mind sees a decade as the very shortest measure of time.
I was reminded of that comment this week as a tentative ceasefire came into effect in the Middle East.
It is too early to know whether the latest ceasefire will hold. But it is early enough to know that it should not. Not if America is going to achieve any of its objectives in the region.
One of the first stated objectives of this war has been the overthrow of the Revolutionary Islamic government in Iran. That objective has not been achieved. It is true that one of the first strikes of this war killed the Ayatollah Khamenei. But his foul Islamic regime, with its terrorist armies at home and abroad, remains in power. It is still able to terrorize the people of Iran, the region and indeed the world.
The historic joint US-Israeli attack on the Iranian nuclear program has undoubtedly set that nuclear program back massively. But it has not completely destroyed it. All parties agree that the regime in Tehran still has stockpiles of enriched uranium.
And while it looks like the majority of Iran’s stockpiles of ballistic missiles have been decimated, they have not been wiped out entirely.
In other words — at present, the revolutionary government in Iran lives to fight another day.
Worst it appears to have come out of this latest ceasefire arrangement in the belief that it can shake the Straits of Hormuz like a fund-raising tin — toll-charging any international container that it “permits” to travel through that waterway.
Which brings me back to that question of objectives and timescales.
At home in America, there are some people who seem intent on portraying the extraordinary successes of this war as failures. Certain Democrats who would ordinarily rail against a totalitarian, bigoted, human-rights-bulldozing regime like that in Iran are keen to portray this war as a loss for America.
One New York Times contributor this week even claimed that the war has turned Iran “Into a major world power.”
Such people are only saying this because they dislike President Trump. If the President caused world peace to break out these same people would oppose it and explain why world peace is not in the interests of the world.
It is the same on the kookiest parts of the American right. Trump castoffs like Marjorie Taylor Greene are enraged because they don’t believe America has the ability to have a foreign policy and a domestic policy. They believe that the world’s superpower can only afford to do one thing at a time and that President Trump is somehow letting down his electorate by looking at any issues further afield than Maine.
Some of this gang have become so devoid of morals that they are even justifying the Iranian regime´s decision to hang teenage protestors.
Such figures of left and right are now insisting that President Trump should step down or (that old, tedious saw) that the 25th Amendment should be invoked.
These noisy barkings might lead some people to forget that polls show that Republican voters (not only MAGA voters) remain massively supportive of the war. The base trust the president’s instincts, and they recognize that America needs to stop the thuggish regime in Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.
But there is a timescale problem. And it is one that Vice President Vance and others are acutely aware of, and appear to be driven by.
While the Mullahs are looking to survive, the Republican party is looking to the House and Senate races in November. Vance and others fear that the disruption of global energy markets and the effects of a few weeks of increased gas prices could lose them the midterms.
But this is where — once again — democracies like America end up being at a disadvantage. It is one that our leaders and the public need to be aware of.
Let us say that the Republicans do lose both Houses in November. Will a weakened administration have the free reign it does now? I doubt it. And what of 2028 onwards? Will a President Newsom or AOC show the kind of determination President Trump has demonstrated to prevent the Middle East descending into a nuclear arms race? I think we all know the answer to that.
There is a reason why the Middle East suffers from so many conflicts.
Why have there been so many wars in Gaza? Why has Lebanon been in a state of war for almost five decades? Why has the whole region, from Yemen to Cyprus had to put up with Iranian interference for 47 years?
Because while the Mullahs and their proxies are thinking about the end-times we are stuck worrying about the midterms. It is this short-term thinking that has lead the West and its allies to keep stopping hostilities just before the point of total victory.
The present ceasefire looks likely to lead to a return of the pre-war status quo. Which means a return not to peace but to war. If the ceasefire lines stop where they are, Iran will help Hezbollah rebuild its stockpiles in Lebanon. The regime in Tehran will rebuild its other terror proxies in the region.And the Iranian regime will continue its decades-long project to develop nuclear weapons.
President Trump has the ability not just to disrupt but to destroy this cycle. He may be the only person in this era of history who can. It is not as though there is any leadership from any other democracy.
The president may not be able to make the regime in Iran fall. But he has the ability to bring it to its knees. And then to leave them on their knees until time, and events, can take their own course on them.
As another sage once put it, “Whatever is worth doing at all, is worth doing well.” To which I might add that any job worth starting is worth finishing well.
