After Trump pauses war, Iranians fly flags of victory, not surrender

LONDON — Shortly after President Donald Trump threatened to erase the “whole civilization” of Iran, all 6,000 years of it, the crowds came out into the streets of Tehran waving flags — and not white ones. They bore the green, white and red banners of the still-standing Islamic Republic. Some set fire to the star-spangled ones of the superpower that, according to state media, they had just “humiliated.”

Whatever the outcome of the unstable two-week ceasefire that the United States and Iran agreed to just before Trump’s apocalyptic deadline — whether it becomes an enduring truce or a return to the violence that has upended life from Israel to Azerbaijan — the pause in hostilities did not begin with images of an “unconditional surrender” that the president repeatedly demanded.

Exhausted Iranians may yet get a fortnight’s respite from airstrikes, but Trump’s central war objectives remain unmet, and hard questions are left unresolved. Each side is claiming victory, but neither is a clear winner.

Trump launched Operation Epic Fury on Feb. 28 demanding unconditional surrender, the elimination of Iran’s nuclear program and the destruction of its ballistic missiles. He, along with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, said they hoped the attacks would lead to regime change.

» READ MORE: Ceasefire in Iran war teeters with diagreements over Lebanon and the Strait of Hormuz

By those measures, Wednesday’s scorecard after nearly six weeks of bombing makes for sober reading.

Iran is battered but unbroken. The regime has not collapsed; it has hardened. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps still has weapons to fire, including ballistic missiles shot at Israel and Persian Gulf states in the hours after the ceasefire was announced, injuring two teenagers in Beersheba, Israel. Somewhere in Iran, a few hundred kilograms of enriched uranium remains as prospective raw material for a nuclear weapon.

Trump’s obvious and growing frustrations over Iran’s death grip on oil shipments through the Strait of Hormuz and spiking gasoline prices for increasingly disaffected voters led him to bring genocidal rhetoric to the social media feed of the American presidency. Iran’s beleaguered leaders, for their part, agreed to let some tankers squeeze through without the promise of a permanent end to the war that they had demanded.

Tuesday’s dramatic agreement to hit pause seems less like an exit ramp than a rest stop for all sides. But without meaningful negotiations, likely to take more than 14 days, exhaustion alone will probably not be enough to keep the violence at bay.

“As of now, I see a return to the war as a more likely outcome than a meaningful settlement,” said Sanam Vakil, director of the Middle East and North Africa Program at Chatham House, a London think tank.

“This is a breather,” Vakil said. “All sides are approaching this with a degree of skepticism, really, because the positions and the demands are very maximalist, and it’s very hard to see where compromises can be found in a two-week time frame.”

In Lebanon, there was not even a breather as Israel declared the ceasefire didn’t apply to its ongoing military assault on Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed militia, and intensified its bombing campaign including targets in Beirut, the capital.

Hezbollah launched counterstrikes on northern Israel and as the attacks continued Thursday, British, French, and other European leaders called for the ceasefire to cover Lebanon as well, in keeping with an original statement by Pakistan, which helped broker the pause between the U.S. and Iran.

Iran, meanwhile, has kept up its blockade of oil tankers in protest, a rebuttal to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who declared triumphantly at a Pentagon briefing that the war was a historic “capital-V military victory.”

“There are going to be a lot of spoilers to watch out for in this process,” Vakil said. “Whether they’re in Israel or Washington or in Tehran, parties are all going to be weighing in and polluting the environment for a settlement.”

Negotiations in Pakistan are expected to begin Saturday with Vice President JD Vance leading the U.S. delegation. The sides have given themselves little time to untangle a decades-long enmity that in recent weeks produced a real cost in lives and civilian infrastructure and now leaves a two-week clock ticking on questions that could define the Middle East for a generation.

The talks presumably will use Iran’s 10-point list of demands as a starting point, including ultimatums that the U.S. withdraw all its forces from the region, end sanctions on the regime, pay compensation for war damage, and cede Tehran permanent control of the Strait of Hormuz.

Trump said he found much to be “workable” in that list, although he and his administration have rejected most of the provisions before.

Given the distance between the sides, a return to the status quo before the war is one very possible outcome. Hopes by the U.S., Israel, and Gulf states that the pain of the war might at least end with a defanged Iran no longer reigning as the region’s main state sponsor of terrorism and mayhem may yet slip away. The regime that the United States and Israel were eager to see fall may well endure for years.

So far, it has achieved its fundamental goal of survival in the face of military onslaught. Whether it can persevere in the long term, amid a collapsed economy, devastated infrastructure, and a deeply oppressed but restive population will depend on the terms it can wrest to end the war.

“With sanctions relief or compensation, they may be able to recover,” Vakil said. “But if they don’t have that, they will be in a cycle of perpetual conflict, and the default for the region and the United States will be a return to Iranian containment.”

Both sides were playing brinkmanship and blinkmanship.

Trump seemed to blink repeatedly, as he issued and then delayed his ultimatums that Iran let the oil flow or else. His language escalated with each cycle, culminating Tuesday in the Truth Social post warning “a whole civilization will die tonight” — words that drew rare rebukes even from Republicans. Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R., Alaska) called the threat “an affront to the ideals our nation has sought to uphold.”

On Monday, the president called Iran’s proposal “not good enough.” It was not immediately clear what in the intervening hours led him to accept the same proposal as a “workable basis” for negotiations.

Iran blinked on the strait. Tehran had insisted for weeks it would not open the waterway without a permanent end to the war, sanctions relief, and reparations. Instead, it accepted a two-week pause with none of those guarantees in hand.

Still, both sides were ready with the confetti.

The crowds gathered in Tehran on Wednesday chanted defiance, not defeat — burning American and Israeli flags and celebrating what state media cast as resistance against a superpower assault.

The White House insisted all its prewar boxes had been checked by the relentless runs of American and Israeli war planes: Iran’s military was crippled, they said, the oil would flow, they promised, and the new leaders in Tehran, Trump said, were an upgrade from the regime led by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was killed by an Israeli strike in the war’s opening minutes.

Experts dismissed those claims as wishful thinking at best.

Iran said it is keeping its missiles trained on the neck of the Persian Gulf and that vessels would traverse it only with its permission. With the regime reportedly demanding steep payments to let the tankers through, shipping companies face an unprecedented prospect of Iran tending the passage like a troll under a bridge, imposing tolls and making threats and backing up one-fifth of the world’s oil supply at will.

Iranian dominance of the Strait of Hormuz is a very unwelcome consequence of this war, according to Julien Barnes-Dacey, director of the Middle East and North Africa program at the European Council on Foreign Relations, one that even Iranian hard-liners hadn’t dreamed of in the past.

“They’d never blocked Hormuz before,” Barnes-Dacey said. “The conflict woke them up to this tool.”

In the Gulf states, the upheaval has been dizzying. They watched the U.S. prosecute a war largely not of their choosing, then signal a desire to exit. They prayed their air defenses would hold as Iran launched drones and missiles at the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and Qatar, and now watch as Iran claims victory and achieves a ceasefire while still being capable of hitting their territory.

Arab nations, which had been smoothing relations with Tehran in recent years, will have to find a way to coexist with their still-dangerous neighbor across the water. But it could take years to resume any path to genuine cooperation, Barnes-Dacey said.

“Tehran has demonstrated very clearly the pain it can inflict upon them,” he said. “It’s obviously going to be in their economic and stabilizing interest to find some kind of accommodation with Iran. But I don’t think there’s any real prospect of a warm, integrated regional push for peace at this moment.”

In Israel, the ceasefire complicates plans that Netanyahu had to keep pounding Iran. The prime minister argued against halting attacks, according to reports in Israeli media. When Trump proceeded anyway, Netanyahu found himself publicly supporting a deal he tried to kill — and immediately carved out an exception for Lebanon, directly contradicting Pakistan’s mediators.

The deeper wound was strategic.

Before the war, Netanyahu had reportedly pitched Trump on a plan to destroy Iran’s ballistic missile program in weeks and topple the regime. Netanyahu has viewed the Islamic Republic and the proxy groups it has funded and armed in Lebanon, Gaza and Yemen to be Israel’s greatest threat. Leaving hard-liners in Tehran and even a damaged nuclear program in its bunkers is not what the prime minister promised Israelis who have endured night after night of airstrikes.

The political fallout came from every direction. Opposition leader Yair Lapid called the ceasefire one of the greatest “political disasters in all of our history,” saying Netanyahu had “failed politically, failed strategically, and didn’t meet a single one of the goals that he himself set.”

A parliament member from one of Netanyahu’s allied far-right parties, Zvika Fogel, addressed Trump directly. “Donald,” he posted, “you turned out to be a duck.”