Forget the Forever Wars. We May Be in Forever Limbo.

President Trump was on a conference call late last month from the Situation Room with leaders from across the Middle East and South Asia to pitch a deal that he believed was within reach to end the conflict in Iran. Trump asked for their support in a roll call, going one by one through Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Turkey, Egypt, Jordan, Bahrain, and Pakistan. All answered in the affirmative. Trump’s tone, according to officials briefed on the conversation, suggested that he believed each country should be in his debt for taking on Iran. And he wanted their individual sign-off so he could claim a joint initiative to rein in the regime.But then Trump reached for something bigger: He proposed linking the Iran negotiations to a major expansion of the Abraham Accords, the U.S.-brokered agreements normalizing relations between Israel and some of its neighbors that Trump regards as a signature foreign-policy achievement. He suggested that those countries that hadn’t yet joined the Abraham Accords get on board—but received a less than lukewarm response.A U.S. official, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive diplomatic efforts, told us one leader piped up to say that it was an interesting suggestion; foreign officials described an awkward silence. Several times during the 90-minute call, Trump had to interject: “Hello? Hello? Anyone there?”The awkwardness of the conversation, the details of which have not been previously reported, encapsulates what has gone awry in the roughly eight weeks since the United States and Iran entered a tentative cease-fire designed to allow negotiations for a longer-term deal. That agreement has remained out of reach, despite repeated indications that it was all but done, through a combination of mutual skepticism, differing incentives, the variety of issues to resolve, and Trump’s determination to force a grand regional transformation.Critics of Trump’s decision to go to war contend that his im