Chicken Trump blinks – but I'm sure he was planning to launch nuclear weapons at Iran

Like everyone else, I guess, I had a restless night and breathed a huge sigh of relief this morning on reading that 90 minutes before his (self-imposed) deadline, Trump had decided to blink first and climb down.

It’s a breathing space, for sure, but no more than that.

Not only has the USA not won its end of the war – Israel under Netanyahu has always preferred forever wars to peace; he’s said he’d been wanting to destroy the ayatollahs’ regime for forty years – it’s left the entire region in a far worse position than it was some 40 days ago when the fighting started as well as raising the very real prospect of a global economic recession that would make 2008 seem like a kid’s birthday party.

You need only look at the 10 point Iranian plan which Trump has accepted as the basis for negotiations to see this. The Strait of Hormuz which was freely open for shipping on 28 February is now closed.

Iran is now hinting it will impose a ‘safe passage toll’ of $2m per ship to be split with Oman. The USA must agree never to attack Iran again.

What’s more, none of the motley mass of ‘war aims’ burbled out by Trump and Netanyahu have truly been achieved.

Yes, Iran has been prevented from deploying nukes – but it never had any. Yes, the top tier of ayatollahs and the IRGC has been obliterated (not ‘decimated’ as Trump claims, which means every tenth one has been killed so nine remain) but not only are there scores of ayatollahs itching to take their place but it has meant that power in Iran, self-evidently, has been dispersed through the country. So the firing of missiles and drones goes on, regardless.

Trump’s reputation and the reputation of his great nation has been trashed. No one serious in the Western world can any longer rely on the USA; indeed the USA cannot rely on itself because it needs its NATO allies, from Canada to eastern Europe as much as they need the USA.

We were in this together, now European NATO partners are in it by themselves.

Indeed this is the big take-away from this chaotic debacle. The big winners are Putin and Xi and both will be emboldened massively. We must form a security and defence alliance with Germany and France at once.

This ceasefire is a breathing space, no more than that. The situation is worse than it was before the war started and the problems in the Gulf are not going to go away, compounded now by economic hits of a high velocity.

It was clear to the world, to America’s friends and foes alike, that in the past 48 hours Trump had becoming increasingly unhinged; he was off the wall furious with whoever is running Iran because they hadn’t caved into his blood-curdling threats.

I seriously believed that when Trump said ‘a whole civilisation will die tonight’ or ‘open the f***in’ Strait you crazy bastards or you’ll be living in hell’, the US president was seriously thinking of nuking Iran into the stone age. JD Vance seemed to confirm this possibility when he said ‘the US has tools is hasn’t so far decided to use’.

Nukes, of course, are about the only thing the US (and Israel) have which Iran definitely does not have, despite the claims to the contrary. How do we know? Because they’d have used them by now if they’d had them.