"A Whole Civilization Will Die Tonight" — Never Mind, Ceasefire

I want you to understand something about deadlines. When you tell somebody the chicken pot pie is done at noon, you don’t walk out at 10:50 and say actually, never mind, I’m making sandwiches. That’s not how deadlines work. That’s not how any of this works.

This morning, the President of the United States posted — and I am reading this off my phone word for word because I could not make it up — “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.”

A whole civilization.

I had a table of four that went very quiet. One of them was a schoolteacher. She put her fork down.

He had set an 8 PM deadline. He had the whole country — and most of the planet, far as I can tell — holding its breath. Markets were doing whatever markets do when they think the world is ending. I don’t follow markets but my cousin Darlene does and she called me twice before noon.

Then, ninety minutes before the clock ran out, he gets on the phone with Pakistan’s prime minister. And just like that: two-week ceasefire. Suspension announced. Whole civilization presumably okay for the time being.

Markets rallied. My cousin Darlene called a third time.

Now. I am not saying peace is bad. Peace is good. I am glad a whole civilization did not die tonight. That is genuinely my position. But there is something deeply unsettling about a man who declares apocalypse on the internet and then walks it back in the time it takes to watch a movie. That’s not statecraft. That’s a man who yells “I’m leaving!” and then sits back down and eats his pie.

Whole civilization. Lord have mercy.

You want a slice of something while you wait to see what he says tomorrow? I’d get it while civilizations are still intact.