The question shouted at President Trump on Thursday as he waited outside the White House to greet the President of Switzerland was inevitable, even if the answer was less than conclusive. “Mr. President, are we going to war with Iran?” a reporter asked. “Hope not,” Trump replied. After days of Administration sabre-rattling, U.S. intelligence reportedly identifying new Iranian threats, the withdrawal of nonessential U.S. personnel in nearby Iraq, and the deployment of an aircraft carrier and other forces to the Gulf, however, Trump’s vague reply did little to quell a full-fledged Washington furor.

All week, many Trump critics and even some of his most fervent supporters have been warning that his Administration is on a march to unprovoked conflict with Iran. From columnists in Mother Jones to the far-right Fox host Laura Ingraham, the commentariat has been on high alert, seeing in the escalating moves against Iran all the warning signs of a potential shooting war. Some cited dangerous echoes of the run-up to the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, arguing, as the Financial Times’s Ed Luce did, that “Dick Cheney’s heirs are laying the groundwork for an Iran conflict.” Others, like Ingraham, worried that Trump was headed toward the kind of politically disastrous misadventure in the Middle East that he campaigned against. “War with Iran is one of the few almost certain paths for @realDonaldTrump to harm his re-election prospects,” she tweeted. Across the political spectrum, fingers pointed at the President’s hawkish national-security adviser, John Bolton, who has long been a public advocate of regime change in Iran.

But the sudden consensus about a march to war, at least initially, discounted one key factor: the President himself. If anything, it speaks to Trump’s frayed credibility and his reputation for impulsivity that this debate even broke out. Everything we’ve learned about Trump until now suggests that if the President were serious about going to war with Iran, we would already know it.

For much of his Presidency, Trump has been open about some of his most controversial decisions (all of which involved overruling some of his own advisers). The President who proudly called himself “Tariff Man” did not surprise us by launching a trade war and imposing tariffs. The President who labelled the Mueller investigation a “WITCH HUNT” did not surprise us by demanding that his Justice Department and congressional allies investigate the investigators. Trump publicly warned North Korea that he would deliver “fire and fury” on Pyongyang if Kim Jong Un did not cease missile tests and negotiate over his nuclear weapons, and, since Kim decided to do so, Trump has shown that he has not given up on those talks, even if others in his Administration have, and he has continued to praise Kim’s “beautiful” letters to him and their “love”-filled relationship. Regarding Russia, we have heard directly from the President that he wants better relations with Vladimir Putin.

Even on Iran, previous significant decisions have been telegraphed by Trump himself. Few who paid attention to his Twitter feed, campaign promises, and Presidential statements were surprised when, a year ago, Trump unilaterally withdrew from the Iran nuclear pact over the objections of his previous crew of national-security advisers.

Which is why it is significant that the President himself remained largely silent about all the various escalatory steps taken by his Administration in recent days. It was Bolton, not Trump, who, in a highly unusual move for a national-security adviser, issued a statement announcing the deployment of an aircraft carrier and other U.S. military assets to the Gulf. Only when it became clear that the war talk may have gone too far did Trump get in the middle of it, saying that he still wanted to negotiate with the Iranian ayatollahs, not blow them up. “I’m sure that Iran will want to talk soon,” Trump tweeted on Wednesday. That is highly unlikely, given that the Iranians are understandably angry at Trump for blowing up the previous deal they negotiated with the United States. But that is, in fact, the consistent message from the President—and one radically at odds with his own advisers (notwithstanding his insistence—in the same tweet, no less—that “there’s no infighting whatsoever” on his team).

“When people say things, you ought to probably take them at their word,” a former senior Pentagon official told me, when I asked what he thought was happening here. The official, a lifelong Republican and veteran of George W. Bush’s march to war in Iraq, said that all the comparisons this week to the 2003 conflict miss the point about Trump: “He doesn’t want to be pushed into a war,” for one, and, for another, it’s clear that he’s souring on Bolton, as he has soured on previous advisers who pushed for policies that Trump did not support. “There are a lot of signs he is tiring of John,” the former official told me. “Trump gets tired of everybody; he loses patience with everybody, ultimately, and then the question becomes what does he do with that?”

So what is going on here? It strikes me that Trump’s words and actions—and even this conflict with his advisers—reflect a President who believes that “maximum pressure” of the sort he is bringing to bear on Iran can bring the country to the negotiating table, just as he believes it did with North Korea. He wants negotiations, a grand summit with him at the center of the action, peace in our time, a Nobel Prize. He doesn’t want war.

But there are differences, of course, some of which are very telling about how the Trump Presidency has evolved in the nearly two years since “fire and fury” threats against North Korea morphed into a President-to-dictator love affair. As Thomas Wright, a Brookings Institution fellow and one of the sharpest Trump-watchers on foreign policy, put it, “He is trying to rerun the North Korea thing, to be as extreme as he can be up until the point of military action. But the big difference with North Korea is that his advisers then were worried he was going to war, so there was no danger of them pulling him in, whereas, in this case, his adviser wants to drag him in.”

Mark Dubowitz, the C.E.O. of the hawkish-on-Iran think tank the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, agreed that there is an “ongoing tactical debate” between Bolton’s National Security Council and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s State Department over how to proceed on Iran. But Dubowitz, who has served as an outside adviser to Trump officials on Iran policy, argued that it’s very much “within the forty-yard lines” of an Administration that is neither about to invade Iran nor about to abandon its pressure campaign against it.

Instead, Dubowitz told me that he saw the week’s Washington debate as a barometer of Trump-era dysfunction. “Everybody is responding hysterically on both sides, my Twitter feed is full of people either saying, ‘John Bolton is taking us to war on false intelligence’ or, on the other side, ‘Oh, no, Trump is going to meet Rouhani for a summit and we are going to give away the store,’ ” Dubowitz said. “My best guess is we are heading to negotiations, not war,” he added.