Later on Tuesday, Mr Trump announced he was also suspending that effort – which was only a day old, and succeeded in freeing only a few ships – “for a while”, citing what he said was “tremendous progress” towards a deal with Iran. But he kept the US embargo in place, part of a strategy of maximum economic pressure.

Still, Mr. Trump’s suspension of attempts to force ships out of the strait appears to contradict the administration’s stated position that blocking the international waterway is untenable for Iran, and that only the United States has the ability to force it to reopen.

For the White House, the insistence that the war was over was the latest rhetoric in an effort to put a war that has put the biggest political crisis of Mr. Trump’s presidency in the rearview mirror. But mere declaration does not make it true. The missiles were still flying. Both sides insist that they control traffic on the waterway.

And despite Mr. Rubio’s declaration that the war’s objectives have been met, he clearly has not. In 38 days of intense combat, the United States hit about 13,000 targets, according to the Pentagon. But destroying targets wasn’t the only point. Mr. Trump himself outlined his goals as early as Feb. 28, when he told the nation, in a video he recorded earlier, that he had five major goals.

The first, of course, was to ensure that Iran “could never have a nuclear weapon.” But he added that the U.S. had to destroy Iran’s ballistic missiles and their launchers, sink its navy, end support for terrorist groups like Hezbollah and Hamas, and ultimately create the conditions for the Iranian people to overthrow their government.

“The time for your freedom is at hand,” he said at the time.

The Iranian navy is clearly depleted, as Mr. Trump often notes. But only that one is checked from the list. So far, Iran’s nuclear stockpile has not been touched, and at least there is no agreement yet to ship it out of the country or weaken it so that it cannot be easily used in weapons production. Although intelligence estimates differ, U.S. assessments suggest that more than half of Iran’s missiles and launchers survived. It is too early to tell about support for proxy groups, which have been torn apart by Israeli attacks.

And Mr Trump has given up on changing the country’s leadership, at one point suggesting he never asked for it. At other times he has maintained that a regime change has already taken place, citing the emergence of a new supreme leader and other officials, replacing those who died. To most Iran experts — and to many U.S. intelligence agencies — it’s a personnel change.

After all, both Mr. Trump and Mr. Rubio have plenty of reasons to declare that epic fury has ended at some unspecified date in the recent past. Congress was growing increasingly uneasy about the War Powers Act, which requires congressional approval after U.S. troops have been engaged in combat for more than 60 days. His political base is fractured over the question of whether Mr. Trump has followed through on his promise to get America out of protracted wars. And Mr Trump delayed a trip to China once to make sure the war was over, America was victorious and the Straits open before landing in Beijing. The trip is now scheduled for next Wednesday.

Mr Trump’s language has also changed, although he has not gone so far as to say the operation is over. He can’t quite stop himself from describing the current situation as war, even as he begins to retreat. “Our country is booming now, despite the fact that we’re in a — I call it a money war,” he said Monday at a White House event for small businesses.

In other speeches, he has combined the word “war” with other, more civilized explanations: the attack on Iran was a “tour.” At another point he described it as a “detour”, making it sound like a weekend drive in the Middle East with some traffic.

While this all sounds like political platitudes, any real declaration that the war is over represents a fundamental shift in strategy, even for a war in which the White House is plotting its next move day by day. For the past nine weeks, US military power, and the possibility of its resumption, has been celebrated by Mr Trump as the steel behind the negotiations. He suggested that nothing would focus Iranian minds like the prospect of further destruction.

Indeed, when talks on the future of the nuclear program broke down in late February, the US bombing was designed to force Iran to make concessions.

But the bombing campaign, while deadly and destructive, has not changed Iran’s fundamental position, at least not yet. And the success of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in sealing the strait — filling tankers and cargo ships and sending oil and fertilizer markets into a frenzy — changed the dynamic. Mr Trump’s frustration was palpable: he threatened more heavy strikes and attacks on power plants if Iran refused to back down.

The Iranians ignored it, then a few days later Mr. Trump warned, “An entire civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back.” Then there was a ceasefire.

But Iran’s restraint broke when Mr Trump announced a new operation on Sunday to guide ships through the narrow strait, a route that had been declared free of mines. Iranian forces fired on two ships the next day, but the missiles were intercepted by US forces. Gen. Dan Cain, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said on Tuesday that Iran had attacked US forces more than 10 times since the ceasefire took effect, but that the attacks were “below the threshold for resuming major combat operations at this time.”

General Kane added that defining the limit was “a political decision”, meaning it was Mr Trump’s decision. And Mr. Trump, pressed a few hours later to explain where he placed the limit, told reporters, “You’re going to know, because I’m going to tell you.”

“They know what to do,” he said of the Iranians. “They know what not to do.”

Defense Minister Pat Hegseth said Tuesday morning that the new military effort to guide merchant ships through the Strait of Hormuz should be considered an entirely separate enterprise, and a temporary defense effort.

“We’re not looking for a fight,” said Mr Hegseth, who just weeks ago was celebrating US firepower against Iran and urging “maximum lethality”. But he noted that U.S. warships shot down cruise missiles and drones that Iran had fired at ships and merchant vessels, and that Army Apache helicopter gunships also sank six Iranian military speedboats that threatened the ships.

(Mr. Rubio compared the boats to Boston Whalers, small, ubiquitous speedboats. Those killed, he said, sit on the bottom of the ocean with the rest of Iran’s navy.)

Now the administration has gone from declaring that military strikes will change Iran’s leaders to insisting that it’s really economic cutoffs that will do the trick. Mr. Rubio said the United States is now cutting revenue to hold together “what’s left of their fragile economy.”

And he called the Iranians pirates. “You can’t have a situation where the strait is closed to everybody, but they profit from piracy – that can’t happen,” he said. He said only the US has the authority to open the Strait of Hormuz as a “favor to the world”.

He said that to tell the truth, only we can do it. “If we live in a world where a rogue state like this Iranian regime is allowed to claim as a new normal control over international shipping lanes,” he added, “it won’t be long before you see this happening in multiple shipping lanes around the world.”