As shaky U.S.-Iran ceasefire begins, Crocker calls Trump’s threats ‘beyond extreme’ while Baumgartner defends them as ‘Machiavellian’

WASHINGTON – As renewed threats and conflicting claims tested the first day of a U.S.-Iran ceasefire Wednesday, a day after President Donald Trump threatened to destroy Iranian civilization, a decorated American diplomat said the truce could leave Iran’s government in a stronger position than when the United States and Israel launched the war five weeks earlier.

Ryan Crocker, a Spokane Valley native who began his Foreign Service career in Iran and went on to serve as U.S. ambassador to six countries in the region, said each of the 10 Iranian demands that Trump called “a workable basis on which to negotiate” would represent a major concession to the government in Tehran. The demands released by Iran’s official news agency include the United States guaranteeing no further strikes on Iran or its allies, lifting all sanctions on Iran, paying reparations for the war, accepting Iran’s right to enrich uranium and withdrawing all U.S. troops from bases across the Middle East.

“Every single one of those points would constitute a victory for Iran and a defeat for the U.S.,” said Crocker, speaking by phone from Turkey.

Those demands appear to clash with much of the Trump administration’s own 15-point plan to end the war, based on reporting by the New York Times and other outlets. After a key Trump ally in Congress called the starting point for negotiations “troubling,” the White House press secretary said later Wednesday that Trump had agreed to negotiate based on a different set of Iranian demands but provided no details about them.

According to the published demands, Tehran would also maintain control over the Strait of Hormuz, the vital waterway whose closure by Iran’s military has staggered the global economy and prompted Trump to lash out in a vulgar statement on Easter Sunday. On Tuesday morning, Trump reiterated his threat to strike civilian infrastructure and wrote that if Iran didn’t reopen the strait, “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.”

“That was beyond extreme for President Trump, the notion that he would annihilate an entire civilization,” Crocker said. “Obviously, we can’t do that, even with all the air power we’ve got, but to even express the sentiment was beyond extreme.”

With Congress out of session since March 27 for a two-week recess, Republican lawmakers have largely avoided commenting on the president’s recent statements, which have veered between telling Americans on April 1 that the Strait of Hormuz would reopen “naturally” once the conflict ends to threatening to bomb every bridge and power plant in Iran unless the country’s military stops blocking ships in the waterway. But Rep. Michael Baumgartner, a Spokane Republican who sits on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, has been a vocal defender of the war, appearing Sunday on the Fox News program Fox & Friends and telling the BBC on Tuesday that Trump’s “strategic ambiguity” is one of the president’s strengths.

In an interview Wednesday, Baumgartner said he believes Trump’s rhetoric is a savvy strategic choice, invoking the 16th-century Italian philosopher Niccolo Machiavelli.

“President Trump was using language very similar to the language and tone and tenor that the Iranian terrorist regime uses, I think, both to signify the importance of the moment but also to illustrate to them that he was not bluffing,” Baumgartner said. “Machiavelli talks about mirroring your adversary and their approach. And certainly, I think, President Trump was using a similar tactic in the way he was speaking about the Iranian regime that for nearly 50 years has chanted ‘Death to America.’ ”

Democrats in Congress have said Trump’s threats to destroy facilities that provide Iranian civilians with electricity and drinking water would constitute war crimes under the Geneva Conventions. Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., said in a statement Wednesday that threatening to destroy Iran’s civilization is “catastrophically dangerous and goes against everything we stand for as Americans.”

“I am relieved that American servicemembers were not asked to commit war crimes in this President’s name, but none of us should forgive the unacceptable escalation and erratic behavior of this President – or the lasting damage he has already done to America’s standing across the globe,” Murray said after the ceasefire was announced, adding that “Trump’s actions have already cost us tens of billions in taxpayer dollars, left our international credibility in shreds, and left thirteen servicemembers dead with hundreds more wounded.”

Sen. Jim Risch of Idaho, the Republican chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, called the ceasefire “a welcome development,” in a statement Wednesday.

“The administration has been clear that this conflict will not become another ‘forever war,’ and that this conflict would remain limited in both scope and duration,” said Risch, who hasn’t held a public hearing on the war since it began. “Iran’s military capabilities, its ability to advance a nuclear weapons program, and its ability to support terrorist proxy groups throughout the Middle East have been essentially destroyed, making the American people safer as a result.”

Baumgartner said he would support strikes on civilian infrastructure in Iran, adding that “I certainly think the American people can have a lot of confidence that there are appropriate measures in place to make sure that everything is conducted in line with U.S. law.”

“I certainly would support a full range of tools to eliminate the terrorist regime’s ability to continue to threaten America’s interests, and that those strikes would be conducted under the proper use of the law,” he said.

Crocker has also criticized Democratic leaders, notably then-President Joe Biden’s handling of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, and he endorsed Baumgartner in the freshman Republican’s successful run for Congress in 2024. But the retired ambassador differed from Baumgartner on the value of Trump’s approach to the war, arguing that despite the U.S. and Israeli militaries killing numerous Iranian leaders and severely degrading Iran’s navy and missile program, the five-week offensive has further empowered the hardline Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, or IRGC.

“We’ve truly degraded their capacities, but so what? There was nothing in that capacity that threatened us in any case,” Crocker said. “You can’t calculate victory by the number of missiles destroyed. What this has done is to further entrench the IRGC in control of Iran and given Iran greater, not lesser, influence on the Strait of Hormuz. That does not look like total victory to me.”

In contrast, Baumgartner said the U.S.-Israeli strikes have reduced the threat Iran’s government presented to the region and the world.

“I think there’s been significant reduction in a very dangerous threat of the Iranian terrorist regime with their reduction of ballistic missile capabilities, their proxy terrorist forces, and above all, setbacks of their nuclear program,” he said. “So I think that’s a really positive development.”

The GOP congressman said the reaction to Trump’s rhetoric toward Iran has reflected a deep political divide in the United States, and he accused “people on the American left” of “rooting for the Iranians – this regime that has killed so many Americans – simply because President Trump, who they oppose politically, happens to be the president.”

Crocker said one of the most concerning long-term effects of the war is the collateral damage it has done to NATO, the alliance that has bound the United States with its closest allies on either side of the Atlantic since the beginning of the Cold War.

“The non-U.S. members of NATO are thoroughly pissed off at the whole enterprise, because they weren’t consulted, and then demands were placed on them,” Crocker said, adding that by lashing out at allies and calling for the United States to withdraw from NATO, Trump is undermining the alliance even if the prospect of a two-thirds vote in Congress to formally leave NATO is unlikely.

Crocker said Russia is clearly “a net beneficiary” of the war, because weakening NATO has been a long-term Russian strategic objective, because the Trump administration lifted sanctions on Russian oil in response to Iran closing the Strait of Hormuz and because higher global oil prices mean more revenue for Russia’s war machine in Ukraine.

Baumgartner sees the situation differently. He said that although NATO has been a successful alliance “in the sense that it’s kept the Soviets and the Russians out of Western Europe” and he would like to see that legacy continue, he finds it “extremely disappointing” that several NATO member states have refused to let the U.S. military use their airspace to conduct the war with Iran.

The Spokane congressman said he has some concerns about how Trump’s “New York real estate approach” to Greenland has made it hard for European leaders to have “latitude with their own voters,” whose expectations they have to manage because they’re democratically elected. But he said Trump’s threats to seize Greenland – a semiautonomous territory of Denmark – are less important than “the heart of the issue,” which he described as European leaders pursuing left-wing economic policies “that have left them weaker and more dependent.”

“He kind of negotiates by punching in the face and then slapping on the back and smiling, and that can be tough for democratically elected leaders with their own voters, so I think there’s some concern there,” Baumgartner said of the U.S. president. “But by the same token, nobody has done more to actually shore up the future of NATO and those countries to have actual capable militaries and capable industrial base than President Trump.”

Another challenge to the future of NATO, Baumgartner said, is that Muslim immigrants in European countries has created “a real basic democratic political challenge of military operations involving Muslim countries,” suggesting that non-Muslim voters in those nations would be more supportive of going to war with a country like Iran.

The Pakistani mediators who brokered the ceasefire between the United States and Iran announced Wednesday that the agreement included Israel halting its offensive against the Iran-backed group Hezbollah in Lebanon, but Israel denied that and continued its airstrikes, which have displaced more than 1 million people and killed over 1,500, according to the Lebanese health ministry. Israel’s government says it intends to occupy southern Lebanon and force out Shia Muslims, the sect associated with Hezbollah and Iran’s government, but an Israeli airstrike killed an anti-Hezbollah Christian leader and his wife on Easter, the holiest of Christian holidays.

Crocker, who survived the 1983 bombing of the U.S. embassy in Beirut and later served as U.S. ambassador to Lebanon, said Israel’s current approach to its neighbor to the north risks repeating the mistakes that led to the birth of Hezbollah, which began as a terrorist group resisting the Israeli occupation.

“So who knows what comes out of this current operation? Certainly, long-term hardship, misery and suffering for the Lebanese people and further instability for the Lebanese government,” he said. “Israel occupied Lebanon for 18 years and lost 1,100 troops and accomplished nothing. That’s the backdrop for this, and what they’re doing now is remarkably similar to what they did in 1982.”

In addition to the threat of Iran using terrorist attacks against American targets, Crocker said, the five-week war may actually increase the risk of Iran obtaining nuclear weapons, perhaps by buying them from North Korea.

“If anything, we have probably strengthened the camp in Iran that says the only surefire guarantee against western hostility is a nuclear weapon,” he said. “I think this conflict heightens the danger of nuclear weapons proliferation on the part of Iran, not lessens it.”

All in all, Crocker said the U.S. military has “demonstrated tremendous tactical capacity,” but the Trump administration’s approach to the conflict has also shown “strategic weakness.” By failing to fundamentally change Iran’s government, the campaign amounts to “mowing the grass,” a term Israeli leaders use to describe their country’s policy of attacking an enemy they perceive to be getting too strong.

Baumgartner said he believes Trump “has been the most significant American president on Middle East policy since Dwight Eisenhower” and the president has a strong understanding of the region. When Trump mirrors the Iranian government’s apocalyptic threats, he said, “I think more than anything it was effective, rather than concerning.”

“The big picture is America and the world are a lot safer than they were five weeks ago,” Baumgartner said. “And I think the ceasefire is a positive step. That’s really what I care about more than I do about, like, individual language on the way he’s framing things.”