I'm Isaac Saul, and this is Tangle: an independent, nonpartisan, subscriber-supported politics newsletter that summarizes the best arguments from across the political spectrum on the news of the day — then “my take.”

Are you new here? Get free emails to your inbox daily. Would you rather listen? You can find our podcast here.

Today’s read: 15 minutes.

We’re hiring.

Tangle is hiring for two full-time positions: an in-person role as an associate editor and executive assistant to our founder, Isaac Saul, and a fully remote position as a video editor. The deadline to apply for both positions is May 1.

Quick hits.

1. President Donald Trump and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) Secretary General Mark Rutte met on Wednesday to discuss the Iran war. After the meeting, Trump posted on Truth Social, “NATO WASN’T THERE WHEN WE NEEDED THEM, AND THEY WON’T BE THERE IF WE NEED THEM AGAIN.” (The meeting)
2. President Trump said he will impose 50% tariffs on any country that supplies military weapons to Iran. (The threat)
3. The Justice Department’s civil rights division is reportedly investigating Cassidy Hutchinson, a former White House aide who served in the first Trump administration. In 2022, Hutchinson testified before the House committee investigating the January 6 Capitol riots, and the Justice Department investigation appears to center on allegations that she lied in her testimony. (The report)
4. The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee announced that former Attorney General Pam Bondi will no longer appear before the committee to answer questions about the investigation into convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, saying that the original subpoena did not apply now that she is no longer attorney general. (The update)
5. An accused serial killer pleaded guilty to the murders of eight women over 17 years in Long Island’s Gilgo Beach area. He is expected to be sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole in June. (The plea)

Today’s topic.

The two-week ceasefire in Iran. On Tuesday, President Donald Trump announced the U.S. had agreed to a two-week ceasefire with Iran, conditional on the Strait of Hormuz fully reopening to commercial shipping. President Trump announced the deal less than two hours before his 8:00 PM ET deadline for Iran to lift its restrictions on the strait or face strikes on civilian infrastructure. Trump also said that the U.S. received a 10-point peace plan from Iran he believed to be “a workable basis on which to negotiate.”

After issuing his ultimatum on Sunday, Trump posted on Tuesday, “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again,” if Iran missed the deadline. However, in the hours before 8:00 PM, discussions between the sides mediated by Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and Field Marshal Asim Munir produced a deal that evening. 

In a statement, the Supreme National Security Council of the Islamic Republic of Iran said Iran will “cease their defensive operations” provided the U.S. halts its strikes. Furthermore, it said passage through the Strait of Hormuz would be possible “via coordination with Iran’s armed forces and due consideration of technical limitations.” A small number of ships passed through the waterway on Wednesday, though the strait remains a substantial bottleneck. Additionally, Iran has reportedly begun charging ships $1 million or more for safe passage, and it has not indicated whether it will drop this toll as part of the ceasefire. 

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel supports the ceasefire but that it did not apply to Lebanon, and the Israeli military has continued heavy strikes over the past day. A series of attacks in central Beirut on Wednesday killed 182 and wounded 890, according to Lebanon’s health ministry. 

On Wednesday, Iran reportedly shut down the strait again in response to Israeli strikes, insisting that Lebanon is included in the ceasefire (the United States disputes this). On Thursday, however, Lebanese Prime Minister Nawaf Salam said his government is solely responsible for negotiating an end to the strikes 

Broadly, the state of the ceasefire remains uncertain, with Iran accusing the United States of violating the terms of the agreement. Pakistani Prime Minister Sharif urged restraint so that “diplomacy can take a lead role towards peaceful settlement of the conflict.”

Though he initially expressed optimism about a deal to permanently end the war, President Trump posted on Wednesday night that U.S. military assets will remain in place “until such time as the REAL AGREEMENT reached is fully complied with.” Future negotiations are expected to center on a 10-point peace plan circulated by Iran, as well as a 15-point U.S. plan that has not been publicly released. Iran’s plan includes several provisions that have previously been sticking points in negotiations with the United States, such as continued enrichment of uranium and removal of sanctions. Additionally, it calls for compensation for damages sustained during the war and a withdrawal of U.S. combat forces from the region. 

Today, we’ll share views from the right and left on the ceasefire. Then, Executive Editor Isaac Saul gives his take.

What the right is saying.

• The right is mixed on the ceasefire, with many seeing opportunities and risks. 
• Some argue Trump’s threats produced a desirable outcome. 
• Others worry America’s strategic and moral standing has been degraded. 

National Review’s editors explored “an uncertain cease-fire.”

“There were several problems in the strategic conception of the U.S.-Israel campaign. One was that regime change, the only event that would have brought a decisive end to the war, was unlikely to be achieved from the air. It’s possible that, after the pounding it has taken over the last several weeks, the Iranian regime will be considerably more vulnerable to a popular revolt in coming months… The fact remains, though, that the regime still has the guns and protesters in the street do not,” the editors said. “Another is that it was too hard to go and snatch Iran’s highly enriched uranium in a military operation.”

“The Trump administration was correct to consider it intolerable that Iran might develop such a robust missile and drone force that it could deter military action to stop it from developing a nuclear weapon. We have presumably set back its missile and nuclear programs for years, as well as kneecapping its regional power,” the editors wrote. “The war has therefore enhanced our national security, but we shouldn’t look past the strategic costs — global economic distress, more turmoil in the Western alliance, depleted weapons stocks, benefits to the Russian oil economy, and the message that’s been sent to China.”

In The American Spectator, Francis P. Sempa said “Trump confounds critics again.”

“President Donald Trump has once again confounded his many critics by agreeing to a two-week ceasefire in the war against Iran, after threatening to bomb Iran back to the Stone Age and end a civilization,” Sempa wrote. “Those same critics warned us last June that Trump’s authorization to attack Iran’s nuclear weapons facilities would lead to a quagmire and another ‘endless war’ in the Middle East that Trump had campaigned against. Trump confounded the critics then by stopping the war after 12 days once the objective was accomplished.”

“The major dilemma is the Strait of Hormuz, the closure of which is wreaking havoc on the world’s energy markets. Trump’s ceasefire agreement is designed to resolve that dilemma. If the diplomatic route fails… the U.S. has three options: walk away and declare victory, which would leave Iran in control of the Strait; continue the air campaign, which might bring Iran’s leaders back to the negotiating table; and escalation,” Sempa said. “Iran’s threat to the region has been scaled-back. Any solution — military or negotiated — is likely to be temporary — that is the way international relations usually work.”

In The Federalist, John Daniel Davidson wrote “Trump’s hyperbolic annihilationist rhetoric comes with a moral cost.”

“Did Trump really call off some devastating (possibly nuclear) strike because of a deal that only came through 90 minutes before the White House deadline? Maybe. Was the deal already in the bag before Trump made his hyperbolic threat that ‘a whole civilization will die tonight?’ Possibly,” Davidson said. “What does seem clear amid the fog of war, however, is that Trump’s maximalist, annihilationist rhetoric — talk of destroying Iranian ‘civilization,’ ‘never to be brought back again,’ taking out ‘the entire country,’ bombing it ‘into the stone age,’ targeting critical civilian infrastructure like power plants — has already gravely damaged the United States.

“Why? Because America should only wage just wars, and waging a just war means being subject to certain restraints. Just war precludes immoral means — like the mass killing of civilians — to achieve victory. Even threatening such means, as Trump has done, damages the moral conscience of a people as much as it degrades the moral standing of a nation,” Davidson wrote. “Whatever happens, we cannot lose sight of the moral dimension here. In both word and deed, if we do not hold ourselves to a high moral standard then we risk, in a very real sense, becoming the villains in an unjust war.”

What the left is saying.

• The left is cynical towards the ceasefire, saying it highlights the pointless nature of Trump’s war. 
• Some suggest Iran will emerge stronger from this conflict. 
• Others contend the illusion of U.S. military dominance has been shattered. 

The Philadelphia Inquirer editorial board wrote “[the] ceasefire leaves America with little to show for Trump’s war of choice.”

“Whatever peace agreement ultimately emerges will be far from Trump’s ordered ‘unconditional surrender,’ let alone his goal of ‘regime change.’ Instead, the ill-considered conflict that upended the world economy and fractured U.S. alliances leaves Iran’s brutal and repressive government battered but unbowed,” the board said. “The might of the U.S. military remains unquestionable, as does the bravery and dedication of the men and women in uniform. But the war — spearheaded by fools and promising disaster from its inception — has delivered a different defeat: America’s standing in the world has been demolished and the president’s vacuous, unpredictable nature reaffirmed.”

“Tuesday’s ceasefire was declared a victory by both sides. But what did the U.S. gain after spending $45 billion and counting? What do the deaths of more than 1,500 civilians, including 244 children, and 13 U.S. service members resolve?” the board wrote. “Iran’s nuclear ambitions linger, its hold over the Strait of Hormuz has tightened, the damage to its conventional weapons programs is unclear, its regional proxies remain entrenched, and there’s a new generation of ruthless hard-liners in Tehran.”

In MS NOW, Anthony L. Fisher said “Trump’s war may also make [Iran] an even wealthier and more influential regional power.”

“In his zeal to project the U.S.’ ‘strength,’… Trump’s actions on Tuesday have signaled something else entirely: a weak and unstable leader who has done irreparable damage to America’s reputation and the global order,” Fisher wrote. “Among the most befuddling developments: Why did Trump declare Iran’s ‘10 point proposal’ (brokered through Pakistani mediators) ‘not good enough’ on Monday, but suddenly a ‘workable basis on which to negotiate’ on Tuesday? And how can Trump claim to have fully reopened the Strait of Hormuz when Iran still controls it?”

“By essentially shutting down the Strait of Hormuz at the relatively low cost of blowing up a few oil tankers, Trump’s likely illegal war has arguably gifted the Iranian regime unprecedented clout as a regional power,” Fisher said. “So while… Americans can breathe a sigh of relief that unspeakable war crimes aren’t being committed against Iranian citizens in our name, we should not lose sight of the big picture: Our commander-in-chief has given us another reason to doubt his leadership, his mental acuity and his basic decency. Trump’s war has killed many civilians, upended the post-World War II international order and potentially made the Iranian regime a lot richer.”

In The Nation, James K. Galbraith argued “US military power is obsolete.”

“If the ceasefire holds, the vicious attack launched by the United States and Israel on February 28, 2026, will have exposed, for all to see, the obsolescence of US military power. That power consisted mostly of surface ships and bases, both of them impossible to protect from missiles and drones. The entire model, built up in World War II and the Cold War, is finished,” Galbraith wrote. “Acknowledgment of this reality around the world will have vast effects. It may hasten settlement of the other major conflict and tension zones: Ukraine on terms agreed with Russia, and Taiwan on terms agreed with the PRC.”

“Two weeks of uncertainty lie ahead. Forces within the United States and in Israel could destroy the tentative settlement, resume the war, and deepen the damage. They will certainly try. Israel is still savagely bombing Beirut, inviting retaliation from Tehran,” Galbraith said. “Within the United States, a reckoning is overdue. At least since Clinton’s attack on Serbia in 1999, the US has been trapped in a web of delusions about its own power. In Afghanistan, Iraq, Ukraine, and the South China Sea, the US has come up against forces it could not (in the end) defeat. None of these have, so far, dented the psychological carapace of the American elite. Iran’s 10 points should, finally, force reality down their throats.”

My take.

Reminder: “My take” is a section where we give ourselves space to share a personal opinion. If you have feedback, criticism or compliments, don't unsubscribe. Write in by replying to this email, or leave a comment.

• When you sort through the confusion, the messaging over the ceasefire differs greatly from the reality.
• Iran’s 10-point plan is no basis for negotiations — I don’t even think we really have a ceasefire.
• Trump has painted himself into a corner, and there’s no end to this war in sight.

Executive Editor Isaac Saul: A lot has happened since we wrote about Iran 48 hours ago:

On Tuesday morning, as we were writing the newsletter, Trump threatened to wipe out an entire civilization. In Iran, residents began planning for life without gas and power. European leaders, Wall Street traders, and reporters scrambled to understand the sincerity of the threat. Iranian officials pulled out of negotiations, telling Egypt that they would no longer talk to the U.S. Military lawyers identified a small list of infrastructure targets feasibly tied to the Iranian military.

In the late morning, Fox News host Bret Baier said he spoke to the president and that Trump assured him “8 PM is happening” if progress in negotiations wasn’t achieved. The president, remarkably, went about his day; he held meetings with tech investors, Justice Department officials, and even phoned into a rally in Budapest, where Vice President JD Vance was campaigning for Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. 

In the afternoon, criticism began to pour in, even from Trump’s allies: Perhaps most notably, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni called on Trump to “clearly distinguish” between the regime and “millions of ordinary citizens.” Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) called the potential attacks on civilian targets a “huge mistake.” By mid-afternoon, Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif publicly urged Trump (reportedly in coordination with the White House) to extend his deadline, Iran to reopen the Strait, and for a two-week ceasefire to snap into effect. This seems to be when everything shifted.

At 6:32 PM ET, citing conversations with Sharif, Trump declared on Truth Social that the strikes were off. He said the U.S. received a “10 point proposal from Iran” that would be a “workable basis on which to negotiate.” Iran’s Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf called it an “agreed framework.” 

What happened next is an area of serious contention, but this is the best I can discern: 

Iran circulated its 10-point plan, which would require all manner of major concessions from the U.S. Among other things, it demands the U.S. cease all military aggression, grants Iran control of the Strait of Hormuz, allows Iran to enrich uranium, lifts sanctions, requires war reparations to Iran, and calls for a ceasefire in Lebanon, where Israel was (and is) hammering Hezbollah and civilian centers in Beirut. 

The administration didn’t deny this was the 10-point plan Trump was referencing, even while it circulated through the media and drew criticism for being so lopsided in Iran’s favor. Eventually, U.S. officials came out to say they had forced concessions on the Iranian plan, and their revisions were the actual basis for negotiations. Also, Trump administration officials said, the U.S. had put together a different 15-point plan for ending the war. 

That’s three plans — Iran’s 10-point plan, the U.S. revisions to that plan, and a separate 15-point plan that the U.S. has — all of which are purportedly the basis for the ceasefire. As of this writing, only the Iranian 10-point plan is public. 

At the same time, those terms didn’t seem to be conditions for the immediate ceasefire. Instead, the U.S. has demanded the Strait of Hormuz be opened and Iran has demanded attacks in Lebanon stop. Yet neither of those things has happened, either.

U.S. attacks in Iran ceased, but Iran began lobbing missiles and drones at Israel and surrounding Gulf countries shortly after Trump’s announcement, claiming that Israel violated the terms of its ceasefire by continuing strikes in Lebanon (#10 in Iran’s proposal: “Cease-fires on all fronts, including against Hezbollah in Lebanon”). Vance said this was a “legitimate misunderstanding,” adding that “the Iranians thought the cease-fire included Lebanon, and it just didn’t,” which strikes me as an almost unbelievable miscommunication and a remarkable diplomatic failure.

As for the Strait of Hormuz, despite Vance and U.S. officials insisting it is now open, nothing seems to have changed. If anything, Iran has tightened its grip. In the past 24 hours, just six ships passed through the Strait of Hormuz, less than the pre-ceasefire average. Even publicly, Iran is saying it will limit passage to just a dozen ships a day, and those ships will pay a steep toll for passage. Before the war started, over a hundred ships a day were passing through the Strait of Hormuz freely.

So, to sum up: There is a 10-point plan that nobody has agreed to and a 15-point plan that the public has not seen and a fundamental understanding that the Strait of Hormuz will open and the attacks in the region will stop, though the strait is closed and the attacks haven’t stopped. Seemingly the only thing that has changed is that the U.S. is not currently pummeling Iran while trying to set up future negotiations. Maybe this constitutes a ceasefire, but talks to end the war have purportedly been happening this whole time, so I’m not sure how meaningful all this is.

For the media’s part, I’m also not entirely sure what we’re supposed to do. When the president announces a ceasefire and what’s left of Iran’s leaders say they have an agreement, we have to report that. We also have to report the on-the-ground reality, and in this case, the delta between the ceasefire terms as described and what is happening on the ground is egregious. 

As for the only 10-point plan we actually have access to, I can’t imagine how it’s even a “workable basis on which to negotiate.” Nearly every point in the plan looks like a nonstarter for the U.S., at least in the context of previous negotiations. If Iran were to get even three of the 10 points implemented in a ceasefire — any three, really — it’d constitute a major improvement from their position a few months ago. 

That certainly doesn’t mean Iran is somehow “winning” the war, which is an even more ridiculous claim than saying the U.S. has achieved a major victory. General Dan Caine’s assessment is that we’ve destroyed 80% of Iran’s air defense systems, 90% of its Navy, 90% of its weapons factories and 80% of its nuclear industrial base, among other things. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei is dead, as are most of his senior counterparts. Iran is obviously weakened, and their capacity for terrorism, nuclear proliferation, or attacking its neighbors is considerably degraded.

Yet, at the same time, Iran has proven it can exert serious economic leverage on a global scale by controlling this single waterway. They’ve shown that they can tolerate an unspeakable amount of damage to their own leadership and their civilian population. They’ve weathered the most threatening, straightforward promises of mass destruction imaginable from a U.S. president and watched as almost none of them have come to pass. And now they are negotiating from what they clearly understand is a position of strength, given that they are demanding concessions they’d never have even swung for in these negotiations just a few short months ago.

Trump, for his part, seems to be improvising in real time. He suggested that Iran and the U.S. could enter a joint venture and control the Strait of Hormuz together, which is a rather shocking proposal when you pause to think about it for even a moment. “The terrorist regime we said we needed to wipe off the face of the earth on Monday will, on Wednesday, become our business partner for the future, and our ships will pay tolls that line their pockets!” That’s to say nothing of the precedent it sets for other nations to begin restricting free passage in international waters, a problem that doesn’t currently exist in large part due to American influence in our global trade system.

Some will take away from this episode that Trump’s “madman act” worked, that Iran blinked, and that “the media still doesn’t understand Trump after all these years.” Trump says big scary thing. Big scary thing doesn’t happen. Supposed deal is agreed to. Cue the takes about Trump the negotiator and a businessman, while the hysterical media are all rubes for pearl-clutching over meaningless words.

The reality I see, though, is far more unsettling. I don’t think the Mad King act is really an act at all; I think the president feels trapped and is finding his way out on the fly, leaving a trail of destruction in his wake. The evidence is right before us. To quote Sohrab Ahmari, the Iranian-American conservative commentator who endorsed Trump as recently as 2022:

The objectives were ever-shifting: changing the regime and putting Iran’s destiny in the hands of its people; degrading military capacity; stopping a nuclear program that had already been “obliterated” in the course of the earlier 12-Day War; reopening the Strait of Hormuz; not reopening the Strait of Hormuz, because we don’t need it anyway; you better “fucking open it, you crazy bastards,” otherwise America will “wipe out a whole civilization”; OK, how about we both run it in a joint venture?

Worse yet, I think he is still trapped and still feeling the walls as he walks through the darkness, guessing on his next moves. I think this war is not over, Iran’s control over this economic lever has not been removed, and we have not found our way out. If you can even call this situation a ceasefire at all, I’m skeptical it will survive the time between me writing this sentence and it being published. I think Trump’s threats were genuine, and the fact they didn’t come to fruition was more happenstance, military bureaucracy, and good fortune than any semblance of a plan or an off-ramp. The “deal” Trump is negotiating is far worse than the one we had, if there is even a shared reality on what the deal is (and I’m not sure there is). And in this case, the media’s purported “hysteria” over the threats to wipe out an entire civilization was not just warranted but perhaps understated; that we’ve moved on so quickly, that it only took a few headlines about a ceasefire deal nobody seems to understand, is perhaps the most worrisome thing of all.

Somehow, impressively, Iran and the U.S. are both losing this war. But that seems to be what war often is — a violent circle of sacrifice and downsides, justified by the people pushing it, and tolerated by the rest of us. 

Take the survey: How long do you expect the war with Iran to last? Let us know.

Disagree? That's okay. Our opinion is just one of many. Write in and let us know why, and we'll consider publishing your feedback.

Your questions, answered.

We're skipping the reader question today to give our main story some extra space. Want to have a question answered in the newsletter? You can reply to this email (it goes straight to our inbox) or fill out this form.

The road not taken.

As we entered Easter weekend, we were watching a number of stories, especially Attorney General Pam Bondi’s dismissal and escalating violence in the Lebanon theater of the Iran War. We ultimately chose to focus on Trump’s deadline in Iran instead of Lebanon on Tuesday, as the level of the president’s threats had immediate and grave implications. Then, after choosing the White House’s budget plan as our main topic on Wednesday, we felt we had missed the window to discuss Bondi’s dismissal today. Were it not for the rapid development in Trump’s messaging over the weekend, both Lebanon and Bondi would likely have been main topics this week.

Numbers.

• 6. The number of ships that crossed the Strait of Hormuz in the past 24 hours, according to a Reuters estimate.
• 95. The number of ships that crossed the strait on February 27, the day before the war in Iran began, according to IMF Portwatch.
• 130. The average number of ships that crossed the strait each day before the war began, according to The New York Times.

The extras.

• One year ago today we wrote about the Supreme Court’s deportation ruling.
• The most clicked link in our most recent newsletter was Managing Editor Ari Weitzman’s interview with former EPA Administrator Christine Whitman.
• Nothing to do with politics: A look into the world of obsolete media.
• Our last survey: 2,759 readers responded to our survey on Trump’s 2027 budget with 90% opposing the plan and expressing concern over funding it. “National defense is the primary role of the federal government. However, the party of fiscal restraint continues to increase the national deficit and debt,” one respondent said. “We’ll only have peace when we pay more for it than we do for war,” said another.

Have a nice day.

Immediately after Texas’s crushing defeat in the Battle of the Alamo in 1836, Mexican soldiers looted the site, removing personal items from Texian combatants and important artifacts from the battlefield. On March 5, 2026, a day before the battle’s 190th anniversary, archaeologists uncovered a solid bronze cannonball in a layer dating back to the siege. Tiffany Lindley, the director of archaeology at the Alamo, said the cannonball was “very likely” from the 13-day battle and hopes to display it at the Alamo Visitor Center and Museum, which is scheduled to open in 2028. Fox News has the story.