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From threatening a civilization to ceasefire: What we learned from a wild day in the Iran war

President Donald Trump’s fast pivot on Iran — from “a whole civilization will die tonight” to a benign return to negotiations — has a whipsawed world scratching their heads. What was he up to? One possibility: Many Western analysts believe that Russian nuclear doctrine includes a concept called “escalate to de-escalate,” in which Moscow would use a tactical nuclear weapon early in a conflict to shock a stronger adversary into backing down from a conventional conflict. (The Russians deny this strategy exists.) On Tuesday, Trump may have carried out a kind of Truth Social version of “...