First things first: The opening salvo of our war with Iran didn’t take place on Donald Trump’s watch. It took place on Jimmy Carter’s watch, on November 4, 1979, when a mob of radical Muslim students stormed our embassy in Tehran and proceeded to hold our people hostage there for 444 wrenching and humiliating days.

By allowing our people to be kidnapped and propagandized for well over a year, Carter lost what author Mark Bowden called in his 2006 book Guests of the Ayatollah our nation’s first battle with militant Islam.

Weakness is provocative. And in the case of our nation’s weakness toward Iran, we’ve been paying the price for 47 years.

Donald Trump, though, is no Jimmy Carter. Nor is he a dementing weakling like Joe Biden or a red-line-drawing pushover like Barack Obama. No, Donald Trump talks a tough game and backs it up with tough action. Which is why we find ourselves today in a bit of a predicament.

Trump has set a deadline of 8 p.m. Eastern Time for the Iranian regime — to the extent that it can still be called a regime — to reopen the Strait of Hormuz or else.

Or else what? you ask. Here’s how Trump put it in a Truth Social post earlier this morning:

A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will. However, now that we have Complete and Total Regime Change, where different, smarter, and less radicalized minds prevail, maybe something revolutionarily wonderful can happen, WHO KNOWS? We will find out tonight, one of the most important moments in the long and complex history of the World. 47 years of extortion, corruption, and death, will finally end. God Bless the Great People of Iran!

That first sentence is classic Trump — escalating to de-escalate, speaking figuratively rather than literally. Or, as he himself put it in The Art of the Deal, an “innocent form of exaggeration” called “truthful hyperbole.”

Trump, of course, won’t wipe Iran and its 93 million people off the map tonight, won’t bomb them “back to the Stone Ages where they belong,” as he put it in last week’s prime-time address. Not a chance. But he’s deadly serious about winning this “excursion” and ending its hostilities, and about accomplishing each of the four objectives — largely already achieved — that he listed from the jump: obliterating Iran’s missiles and production, annihilating its navy, severing its support for terrorist proxies, and ensuring that Iran never acquires a nuclear weapon.

What we need, then — and what I expect to hear about in the waning minutes of tonight’s deadline — is a breakthrough in negotiations that allows both the American president and the Iranian nation to save face. Again, Trump can’t bomb Iran into oblivion, but nor can any Iranian negotiators hope to keep from being summarily shot by Iran’s secret police or its Revolutionary Guard Corps if they agree to a complete capitulation to Trump’s demands.

“Vice President JD Vance,” the Washington Examiner reports, “implored leaders in Iran to respond promptly to President Donald Trump’s demand for a ceasefire deal by 8 p.m. Tuesday to avoid the unnecessary loss of innocent life. While speaking at a press conference with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban in Budapest, Vance said that the end of the war in Tehran ‘is ultimately up to the Iranians.’”

Vance continued, observing that he believes Iran has two options:

I think the pathway one is where the Iranians decide they’re going to be a normal country. They’re not going to fund terrorism anymore. Option B is, if the Iranians don’t come to the table and they stay committed to terrorism, to terrorizing their neighbors, not just Israel, but, of course, their Arab neighbors too, then the economic situation in Iran is going to continue to be very, very bad, and frankly, will probably get worse.

Vance also noted that the Iranians “were not the fastest negotiators before the war started” and “are certainly not the fastest negotiators now … but we feel confident that we can get a response, whether it’s positive or negative, we’re going to get a response from the Iranians by eight o'clock tonight.”

So there you have it: the makings of an eleventh-hour breakthrough.

Earlier this morning, Fox News’s Bill Hemmer seemed to reinforce Vance’s observation, saying that he’d spoken to “a senior U.S. official very close to these talks … and the quote I got from this individual is that ‘we are absolutely in touch with Iran, absolutely. It’s been productive. If we get lucky, we will have something by the end of the day.’”

My prediction, then, is that Iran will stave off its extinction, and our negotiators will reach a deal just prior to 8 o'clock ET. It’ll be the greatest negotiation in history, and you’ll never have seen anything like it anywhere in the world.

Unfortunately, such a scenario ultimately favors what’s left of Iran’s regime. As National Review’s Jim Geraghty writes: “If the mullahs and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps remain in power when the shooting stops, they will not only let out a deep sigh of relief, they will have good reasons to believe that the U.S. will never attempt a comparable operation against them again.”

He’s right. But Donald Trump was also right to hit Iran and hit it hard. And none of Trump’s Democrat detractors will be able to credibly argue that the Iranian regime we leave behind is more than a shadow of its former menacing self.