As the "memorandum of understanding" that was supposed to herald the end of Donald Trump's war on Iran expires, so may the American public's patience with his tragic clowning on the global stage. The world's leaders lost patience with Trump long ago, except for American adversaries like Vladmir Putin and Xi Jinping, who benefit enormously from his incompetence and malice.

What the expiration exposes, as if everyone had not already worked this out, is that Trump's impetuous warmaking has boxed the United States into a diplomatic and military cul-de-sac, leaving us and our allies in a worse position without achieving any of his stated goals.

The only initiative that Trump appears capable of accomplishing is to make a truly historic debacle even worse — by threatening, as he told a Fox News reporter, to "bomb the shit" out of our allies in the Gulf state of Oman, who have tried to serve as a negotiating conduit with Iran. Evidently Trump is frustrated by the Omani inability to solve his self-imposed conundrum, and angry that, like our other allies in the region, they feel growing pressure to find a way to open the Strait of Hormuz. They were probably not comforted to see Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth puffing himself up to declare that we can keep the strait blocked "indefinitely."

Hegseth's vow would appear to contradict Trump's frequent public lying about that waterway, which he has described as "open" thanks to the U.S. military presence. Neither Hegseth's boasting nor Trump's prevaricating has assuaged the pain of rising energy costs for everyone, including American consumers. As voters, they must be wondering how best to punish this feckless and foolish leadership, whose pitiful record now includes their failure to provide decent living conditions for our sailors on the ships patrolling the Mideast waterways on extended missions.

Bereft of any strategic capacity on his own, and surrounded by clowns and frauds in top national security positions, the president of the United States, the most powerful man in the world, can find no way out of the ongoing crisis that he alone created.

The end of the ceasefire, according to the White House, will shortly result in additional "crushing" sanctions against Iran, which will feel familiar to the Iranians and seems unlikely to accomplish anything beyond that same tactic's failure so far. Nor are any of the other choices available to Trump very promising.

He can start bombing Iran again, which doesn't seem to move the regime toward meeting any of Trump's demands. He can try to resume negotiations, with the full knowledge that the Iranians are not going to meet his maximal demands on their disarmament and nuclear program. Or he can simply walk away, as Nate Swanson, an Iran expert at the Atlantic Council, hinted Trump might do — and then try to explain to the nation and the world why we wasted the lives of Iranians and Americans, as well as a vast treasure and a military stockpile, for nothing.

Like Trump himself, we have no idea what will come next in this disastrous misadventure. We do know that the Russians and the Chinese, our authoritarian adversaries, have profited mightily from this president's bumbling, stumbling, megalomaniacal conduct of foreign and economic policy.

What we also know is that this diplomatic dead end was perfectly predictable by anyone who has paid attention. Without any particular expertise in Iranian or Gulf affairs, I predicted it last April, when an earlier ceasefire expired and Trump sent his envoys, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, to negotiate with the Iranians.

"Even if Donald Trump had actually written The Art of the Deal' (he didn't write a word of that bestseller, his first big fraud), it would be foolish to expect that the president or his hapless envoys can deliver a viable agreement with the Iranians anytime soon. Taken together, they lack all the qualities required to achieve the complex diplomatic resolution required in this crisis — like the (nuclear) agreement that Trump so cavalierly discarded in 2017...

"The problem isn't only that Trump and his team of morons neglected to fashion any plan for their sudden urge to attack a faraway country with a million men under arms, a big weapons arsenal, and a long history of ideological resilience. That was a historic and particularly stupid mistake, characteristic of Trump's shallow intellect — but now, after inflicting massive damage on Iran, the world and our own economy, he and his government are evidently stuck in the quagmire they created."

In these circumstances, being right is seriously overrated. I would far rather have been wrong.

Joe Conason is founder and editor-in-chief of The National Memo. He is also editor-at-large of Type Investigations, a nonprofit investigative reporting organization formerly known as The Investigative Fund. His latest book is The Longest Con: How Grifters, Swindlers and Frauds Hijacked American Conservatism (St. Martin's Press, 2024). The paperback version, with a new Afterword, is available wherever books are sold.