Having just returned from Palm Beach, President Donald Trump effectively began his year in Washington on Wednesday, with an address to the American people. At his most optimistic, the 45th president must have hoped the lunchtime statement was a demonstration in leadership. The president took listeners inside the decision curve, declaring an armistice in the harrowing, recent crisis between the United States and Iran’s Islamic Republic.

“Iran appears to be standing down, which is a good thing for all parties concerned and a very good thing for the world,” the president said of Iran’s overnight rocket attack on American bases in Iraq. With that, Trump attempted to put on a bow on a week that threw conservative hawks into ecstasies and restrainer friends of the administration into despair.

“For far too long—all the way back to 1979, to be exact—nations have tolerated Iran’s destructive and destabilizing behavior in the Middle East and beyond,” Trump said. “Those days are over.”

Defenders of the administration’s recent moves—assassinating Iran’s military frontman Qasem Soleimani—have sought to portray it as a Jacksonian tour de force. Washington capped Iran’s leading terrorist, as the U.S. designated Soleimani, thus “reassuring deference,” in light of an Iranian-inspired protest on the American embassy in Baghdad, which was responding to a lethal U.S. drone strike in the country.

Administration chronicler Walter Russell Mead said this week in the Wall Street Journal that “the president’s intuitive understanding of his electoral base’s sentiments is the foundation of his political strength.” Trump’s heartland wanted a reprisal against the clerical regime — and a hard line on the government, in general—but just stops short of another full-on, nation-building crusade.

Mead’s reading, of course, flashes an intuition of its own, a hunch that Trump’s voter base has a both homogeneous and nuanced view on Iran. Conceding the obvious chaos on display in recent days, the president sought to provide context to his decisions. “ISIS is a natural enemy of Iran. The destruction of ISIS is good for Iran, and we should work together on this and other shared priorities,” Trump said, offering a curious coda to a thousand second sermon on the dangers of Iran.

For now, Trump retains a little more in common with Bill Clinton, who rained bombs over the Middle East during an impeachment battle, than his Republican predecessor George W. Bush, who plunged America fully into the dark.