This is exactly right:
"This end game was basically inevitable from the first hours or days of the conflict. But we waited three plus months because Trump couldn’t face the reality of the scale of his defeat. And there’s still a good chance this falls apart because he still can’t come clean on that."
This is a good summary. The US and especially Trump for electoral reasons needs the war to stop. But Iran gained a lot from the conflict while the US achieved nothing. Trumps price was to stipulate an agreement to negotiate on nukes. But that’s what the US and Iran were doing before the war started. So the nuclear component certainly looks like a fig leaf to give Trump some plausible deniability about how badly this went for the United States. As Dan notes, the US has no real credible threat of force left, certainly not before midterms. This end game was basically inevitable from the first hours or days of the conflict. But we waited three plus months because Trump couldn’t face the reality of the scale of his defeat. And there’s still a good chance this falls apart because he still can’t come clean on that. Altogether, just a great job.