Trump Imposes 4–6-Week Deadline to Finish Iran War Before May 2026 Xi Summit

U.S. leaders have repeatedly tried to set politically convenient clocks on wars—Johnson’s 1968 “light at the end of the tunnel” in Vietnam collapsed, while Bush’s 100-hour ground phase in the 1991 Gulf War held because Baghdad accepted terms. Trump’s compressed timetable echoes Nixon’s 1972 rush for a Vietnam cease-fire to clear the way for détente with China—useful domestically but dependent on the adversary’s will. Strategically, the episode spotlights a 20-year trend: Washington wants to pivot resources from Middle East entanglements to counter-balancing China, yet keeps getting pulled back by energy chokepoints and allied security commitments. If the deadline slips, it will reinforce a century-long pattern—from the 1919 intervention in Russia to Afghanistan 2021—of the United States overestimating its ability to dictate the tempo of distant wars. Conversely, a genuinely swift termination would mark a rare instance of a major power ending a conventional conflict on its preferred schedule, potentially accelerating the shift of U.S. strategic focus toward the Indo-Pacific for decades to come.