President Donald Trump has received an enormous amount of pressure over the last week to join Israel’s war against Iran. The conservative radio host Mark Levin has used his show, as well as a private lunch with Trump, to highlight the dire threat a nuclear-armed Iran poses to Israel, the United States, and world civilization. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) has jumped on Fox News at every opportunity to press Washington either to provide the Israeli Air Force with the big, 30,000-pound Massive Ordnance Penetrator (MOP) munitions that are required to level Iran’s underground nuclear facility at Fordow or to bomb the site itself. Some of the more delusional thinkers have spouted off about using Israel’s bombing campaign to change the regime in Tehran or to disarm the Islamic Republic. And then there’s Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who despite his assertions to the contrary is no doubt trying to convince the White House to become a belligerent.

Trump, however, didn’t get elected to a second term to start new wars—he was elected to end them. He said so himself during his inaugural speech. Trump may talk about killing foreign leaders like the North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un (during the first year of his first term) or the Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, but his actions are more restrained than his rhetoric suggests. Yes, he inherited an air war against the Houthis in Yemen and chose to accelerate it by widening the scale and pace of strikes, but he also decided to call it quits after less than two months, partly because the operations weren’t doing much of anything to protect freedom of navigation in the Red Sea. When Trump does decide to use force, he has favored quick, theatrical displays—like the 2017 and 2018 U.S. airstrikes on Syrian military assets—instead of the kind of drawn-out wars that epitomized the George W. Bush and Barack Obama presidencies. 

Earlier this week, Trump declared that nobody knew what he was going to do on Iran. On June 19, he made his decision: War will be averted, for now. “I have a message directly from the president: ‘Based on the fact that there is a chance for substantial negotiations that may or may not take place with Iran in the near future, I will make my decision on whether or not to go within the next two weeks,’” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt stated on June 19. Trump, it seems, is willing to give the Iranians two more weeks to show up to a serious negotiation and find a diplomatic way out of the crisis. 

That’s good news, even if the hawks cry about it on television. Although proponents of the military option have tried to assure the White House that taking out Fordow would be a fairly easy, smooth, and limited U.S. military operation, it would also be an act of war visited upon a country, Iran, that doesn’t shy away from retaliation when its back is against the wall. We saw this play out five years ago, when the U.S. assassination of Iran’s Gen. Qasem Soleimani incited Tehran to launch a couple dozen ballistic missiles at two U.S. bases in Iraq, which injured around 100 U.S. service members. By a stroke of luck, no American was killed in those attacks and Trump was able to deescalate before full-blown war erupted. 

But luck is a bad crutch for a policy to lean on. Even a limited U.S. operation against Fordow wouldn’t be clean. The Iranians would respond to such a strike as they have in the past, and while nearly half of its ballistic missile inventory may be used up, they still have hundreds available (if not more) to strike U.S. bases in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Jordan. As the New York Times reported on June 17, “Iran has prepared missiles and other military equipment for strikes on U.S. bases in the Middle East should the United States join Israel’s war against the country.” 

Pundits can wave these stories away, but U.S. policymakers, let alone the president of the United States, can’t afford to be so cavalier. It would only take the death of one American for Trump to be under intense pressure, including from within his MAGA base, to escalate further. A limited one-off military action could then snowball into the very kind of conflict Trump doesn’t want to fight. 

The long-term impacts of a U.S. military strike wouldn’t be rosy either. The Trump administration has stressed that Iran can never be allowed to acquire a nuclear weapon, a position every successive U.S. administration has taken since the Iranian nuclear issue became a major U.S. foreign-policy concern. The question, however, is: What is the best way to accomplish this objective? The neoconservative and interventionist wings that have long sought the Islamic Republic’s demise have consistently claimed that wiping out Tehran’s nuclear infrastructure is a better way at getting at the problem than sitting down with the mullahs and negotiating an amicable agreement. And with time, the logic goes, U.S. military action could fundamentally weaken the foundations of the Islamic Republic to the point that the bearded ayatollahs are run out of town.

Yet if non-proliferation is the U.S. policy goal, then destroying Iran’s uranium enrichment capacity from the air would be an awful way to do it. This is due not only to the risks involved in any high-stakes military operation but also because using force is a great way to push Khamenei into ordering a dash toward a nuclear bomb. Thus far, this is a decision the supreme leader has not taken. Getting clobbered by a superpower, however, tends to have a shocking effect on smaller states that can’t compete at the conventional level and are already living in a tough neighborhood. A nuclear deterrent, whose appeal has already grown among some segments of the Iranian security establishment, becomes even valuable in this scenario. And since the Iranians would likely kick out International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors from their country in retaliation, the world would have a much more difficult time determining when and where Tehran was seeking to reconstitute its program. 

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Perhaps Trump thought of all of this in his deliberations. Perhaps not. The important thing is more time has been put on the clock. Fortunately, U.S. Envoy Steve Witkoff retains an open line of communication with Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, and European officials are scheduled to meet with their Iranian counterparts on Friday. The Gulf Arab states are offering their services as well to deescalate the situation, so there are multiple opportunities for a diplomatic exit-ramp.

Even so, that exit ramp will only be a viable route if Trump is willing to actually negotiate a deal that he and the Iranians can live with. At the moment, he isn’t negotiating so much as giving ultimatums the Iranians are highly unlikely to bow to. This needs to change, and fast, because the current positions of the parties—the White House continues to insist on zero enrichment while Iran continues to insist that enrichment is a red line—make an impasse. 

Trump has a choice: He can cede a maximalist position in the service of peace, or he can stick to it and again find himself at the precipice of war in two weeks.