Since December 28, and with high intensity since January 14, the question that has been causing the whole planet to hold its breath has been: Will the Trump administration order an attack on Iran or not?
Unfortunately, for anyone looking for certainty in the next day or so, the waiting is likely to continue.
There was close to absolute certainty that Trump would attack on January 14, because he pretty much told the whole world he would and even issued initial orders for an attack, until he changed his mind and didn't attack.
Then there was close to absolute certainty that he would attack on January 26 when the long-awaited US Lincoln aircraft carrier group finally arrived from the Asian theater – until he didn't.
Finally, there was slightly less certainty, but still quite a lot, that he would attack around Wednesday of last week during the few hours after US and Israeli sources leaked that the talks with Iran for Friday had been cancelled – until Washington confirmed that the negotiations were back on.
Of course, this is only one side of the story.
Trump's decision making
When Trump met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on December 29, the US president seemed to take it for granted that the regime in Tehran would kill large numbers of its people and that there was not much to do about it.
When he later set a red line that he would attack if the Islamic Republic followed through on murdered masses of its people, and the ayatollahs ignored his red-line killing between 5,000-30,000 on January 8-9, he did nothing.
His threat five days later came only after many videos and negative media coverage started coming out, causing him embarrassment. But his heart was never in it to save the Iranian people, or certainly not to put American lives at risk to do so.
There was a short period when he thought knocking off and controlling the Iranian regime would be as easy as in Venezuela.
But as soon as he realized that was not the case, he started making noises about negotiating a new nuclear deal.
Since then, he has kept his threat and his aircraft carrier on the table and in the ayatollahs' faces, but far more of his statements have been about wanting to reach an agreement.
Here and there, he or members of his administration have said the words "ballistic missile limitations" or "proxy limitations", but not with the same conviction and regularity as "nuclear limits."
Netanyahu only arrives in DC on Wednesday.
The prime minister has traveled and ordered a major attack from a distance before – see former Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah's surprise.
But for a variety of reasons, that is unlikely here.
All the Iranians need to do to pull out talks into next week and possibly further is make it clear that they will commit to a long-term uranium freeze and accept their 400-plus kilograms of 60% uranium being neutralized or diluted one way or another.
If they do that, Trump will be able to claim a much better deal than former US president Barack Obama nailed down in 2015.
That may not be enough for Trump.
He may also decide that to crown his better deal, he needs some kind of limit on Iran's ballistic missiles and terror proxies.
If he does, but Tehran has given him enough on the nuclear issue, talks could easily draw out into March or later.
So the endgame is still unclear.
Of course, it's also possible that the ayatollahs make a big mistake and offer Trump too little on the nuclear issue in the coming days, leading to an American attack toward the end of this week/early next week.
What might be a medium win for Israel on non-nuclear issues besides its completely unrealistic demand of limiting such missiles to a 300-kilometer range?
First, ballistic missiles need to have a range of 1,000 to 1,500 kilometers to reach Israel, so even a complete cutoff could be at a much higher range than 300 kilometers.
Next, the Islamic Republic having some ballistic missiles is not an existential threat.
In fact, Tehran has had ballistic missiles for around 30 years, and Israel still exists, with the Arrow defense system at an 86% shoot down rate.
What pushed the Israeli defense establishment into treating Iran's ballistic missiles as a potential existential threat was not that they exist.
It was the potential of Iran jumping from the 2,500 level and a couple of hundred in a day maximum, to 6,000, 8,000, or 10,000 total with 500 or more in a day maximum.
Right now, the Islamic Republic has only recovered to around the 2,000 missile level. If Trump can get Iran to freeze its missile production at that point, the ayatollahs will remain a threat, but will not be an existential one.
This is all Israel said it hoped for after the June 2025 Israel-Iran War.
Obviously, toppling the ayatollahs, thus potentially ending the Iranian threat and freeing some more reformist-minded Iranians, would be the best-case scenario.
But Israel does not have the power to achieve that, so if Trump won't do it, it just is not an option.
In that case, ending the nuclear threat and limiting the ballistic missile threat would still be mega wins.
But the public will need to wait some more, maybe quite a bit more, before the final picture emerges from the fog.