Iran responded by attacking American bases in the Gulf. The speaker of Iran’s Parliament, Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf, a former Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps commander, suggested that the ceasefire had formally ended and declared, “We don’t fold.”

Trump warned that more strikes were on the way and vowed to hit Iran “hard.” Not for the first time, the president threatened to attack “at the highest level,” which he described as including bridges and electric plants.

“If we have to, we’ll take them out,” Trump told reporters at the NATO conference before threatening to “take over Kharg Island,” Iran’s main oil processing facility.

The strikes and the rhetoric are a sharp reversal of policy.

Just 22 days earlier, Trump had described Iran’s leaders as “very rational people” who were “not radicalized” and “nice to deal with.”

At the time, Vice President JD Vance called the deal a “win-win” for the U.S. and suggested that the deal was already “bearing fruit” by letting oil move through the Strait of Hormuz. Vance argued that the deal was purely about “rewarding good conduct and punishing bad conduct.”

“If the Iranians don’t change their behavior, their military and their nuclear program is still destroyed,” Vance said. “If they do change their behavior, then they are going to have a transformative relationship with the Middle East.”

The agreement lifted pressure on Tehran in exchange for promises that the regime had no intention and little incentive to keep.

Counting on the Islamic Republic to change its behavior was always a bad bet. Anti-Americanism and antisemitism are not bargaining positions for Tehran, but core tenets of the regime’s ideology.

Since its bloody birth in 1979, the regime has chanted “Death to America.” Its actions have shown that it means what it says.

For nearly half a century, the Islamic Republic has kidnapped, tortured, and murdered Americans while its proxies have sown death and destruction throughout the world.

Iran, as Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in February, is the “single greatest source of instability in the Middle East.”

Operation Epic Fury targeted and killed the upper echelons of Iran’s political and military leadership and severely degraded its defense industrial base. The joint U.S.-Israeli military campaign deeply damaged Iran’s ability to project power, but it did not eliminate the regime’s will to survive.

By seizing and holding the Strait of Hormuz, Iran forced the U.S. to negotiate. In his defense of the deal, Trump said, “The alternative to this deal was a global recession.” Without the deal, he said, “the Strait of Hormuz would never have opened.”

But the deal counted on Iran to change its behavior and effectively kept it in charge of the strait. By front-loading sanctions relief in the form of oil waivers, the U.S. reduced its leverage right out of the gate.

The Trump administration’s decision to agree to an early ceasefire on April 7, a mere 38 days after the war started, has proven to be a mistake. So was the decision to keep extending the ceasefire while overlooking repeated Iranian violations.

Trump’s attempts to cajole Iran into behaving by repeatedly threatening, and then failing, to launch attacks on the country’s critical infrastructure similarly eroded America’s deterrence.

Iran has taken the measure of American resolve and found it wanting.

MAMDANI’S SOCIALIST BUDGETING LIES

As a result, the Trump administration will now have to work that much harder to regain the initiative and show Tehran that American threats carry weight. The U.S. cannot afford any more empty warnings about “bridges and tunnels,” nor can it pretend that Iran will negotiate in good faith.

The end of the ill-fated deal is both welcome and inevitable. But the hard road ahead is the price of having surrendered the initiative to a regime that never intended to change.