Within hours of Donald Trump’s announcement of the truce, the question running through chancelleries, markets and public opinion is one: what has really been achieved by the blitzkrieg against Iran?

The official narrative, as is often the case in Trumpian rhetoric, is simple, muscular, seemingly decisive: a quick, surgical operation to neutralise a nuclear threat and restore balance in the region. But one need only scratch the surface to find oneself faced with a much more contradictory and, in some ways, paradoxical picture.

Let us start with a fact: the Strait of Hormuz, the symbolic and material epicentre of the intervention, was already open before the bombing. There was, therefore, no blockade to remove nor an immediate global navigation crisis to resolve. Yet it was precisely on Hormuz that the legitimacy of the military action was played out, at least in the narrative.

The result? Today that same strait, instead of being ‘liberated’, becomes even more central to Iran’s geopolitical leverage.
The ayatollahs’ regime, far from being weakened, emerges strengthened in its ability to condition global energy trafficking. More tension means more control, and more control inevitably means more strategic and economic revenue. To the good peace of the Iranian people, who continue to be squeezed between internal repression and international power games.

Even more obvious is the contradiction over the declared objective: to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon. A weapon that, in fact, was not operational. In an attempt to neutralise a potential threat, the operation ended up handing Tehran a much more immediate and concrete instrument of pressure: control, political and military, of one of the most important energy choke points on the planet.

In the meantime, the markets reacted as was to be expected: instability, rising energy prices, tensions on supply chains. A global energy crisis that, although it has not exploded to its full extent, has already shown its first effects. And in this scenario, the main beneficiaries risk being precisely those actors that Washington claims to want to contain.

Among them, inevitably, is Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Every increase in the price of oil represents oxygen for a war economy already geared to support the aggression against Ukraine. In this sense, the chaos in the Gulf ends up translating into an indirect – but concrete, as is increasingly the case when Donald Trump is involved – advantage for Moscow.

But by now the affinities with the Kremlin are uncounted, especially after Trump borrowed from his Russian counterpart and mentor the threat of resorting to nuclear weapons.
The nuclear threat evoked by Trump yesterday is not the slick operation that his cantors are already extolling. To have inaugurated the use of the nuclear threat as a negotiating tool is damaging regardless, because it is now available to all nuclear powers.

Then there remains a more opaque but no less relevant shadow: that of the economic interests that orbit around the political decision. The accusations – difficult to prove but increasingly recurrent – of speculative operations, of insider trading, of an interweaving between geopolitical decisions and private interests, feed a suspicion that further weakens the credibility of American action. In a context already marked by a leadership perceived as unpredictable, any opacity becomes a multiplier of distrust.

And so, rhetoric and triumphant declarations aside, the balance appears at least ambiguous. No regime toppled, no nuclear threat concretely eliminated, an adversary, Iran, still firm and perhaps even strengthened in its negotiating position, and an international system made more unstable.

The real question, perhaps, is not whether this war was won or lost. But whether it was ever meant to be won in the traditional sense of the term. Or whether, rather, it represents yet another episode in a foreign policy that seems to move more by impulses, contingent interests and internal logic than by a coherent strategic vision.

In this scenario, the truce announced by Trump looks less like the conclusion of a successful operation and more like a pause in a precarious equilibrium. A balance in which, once again, it is the peoples and global stability that pay the highest price.

Now, however, attention is already shifting elsewhere. For if there is one constant in the Trumpian trajectory, it is unpredictability elevated to a system. And so, while the political and economic rubble of this crisis is still smouldering, the world is holding its breath waiting for the next move. Perhaps on Cuba, already bent with hunger by the latest restrictions imposed by the Nobel Peace Prize aspirant.

Because, at this point, the only certainty is that from Washington, another trumpeting can come at any moment. And the world, once again, will have to suffer the consequences.