Asked how he could trust pledges from an Iranian regime that just imposed a brutal crackdown and killed at least several thousand of its own people after decades of severe authoritarianism, Trump left Americans with one of his classic cliff-hangers.

Take it from Donald Trump: It’s a “crazy world!”

The American president’s extraordinary — and utterly exhausting — grip on the global psyche intensified on Wednesday.

Tension settled heavily on Washington, stretched across the Atlantic and cloaked the Middle East. Everyone was waiting for fire from the skies.

Would Trumpstrike Iranto make good on his vow that“help is on the way”after the brutal suppression of protesters?

Or is he taking an out, based on apparent and questionable assurances from a source in Iran thatexecutions would stop?

“We’re going to watch and see what the process is,” he told reporters.

Everyone is waiting to see what Trump does next.

And he loves it, as he sits behind the Oval Office desk, flinging out threats, subterfuge and insults like a conductor leading an orchestra — but conjuring not harmony but worldwide chaos.

Asked how he could trust pledges from an Iranian regime that just imposed a brutal crackdown and killed at least several thousand of its own people after decades of severe authoritarianism, Trump left Americans with one of his classic cliff-hangers.

“We’re going to find out,” he told reporters. “I’ll find out after this. You’ll find out, but we’ve been told on good authority, and I hope it’s true. Who knows, right? Who knows. Crazy world.”

One of the craziest things was that Trump was holding forth on a grave issue of war and peace during an Oval Office event promoting full-fat milk that schools will be able to serve to kids undera newly passed law.

“Remember the old days when we were kids?” Trump asked a press pool craving answers as to whether he was about to launch an onslaught on Iran.

In a head-spinning digression, the president continued: “Everybody shared a bottle. Today, we tend not to do that. But if you’d like to, if you trust the person that you drink it after, it’s right here, it’s yours. OK?”

“It’s semi-fresh — five, six days old,” the president said of a bottle of milk that stood on the Resolute Desk.

As it often is during Trump’s era, it was a surreal day in Washington.

The White House welcomeda delegation from Greenland and Denmarkfollowing Trump’sdemand for ownershipof the world’s largest island.

It’s worth underscoring how bizarre this visit was.

The officials were in Washington to insist that the semiautonomous Danish territory was not for sale and Trump should not try to buy it or invade it.

In Trump’s first term, the idea that he would try to snatch Greenland in a bid to go down in history as one of the presidents who honored America’s “manifest destiny” with new territory was regarded as a joke. But in his second, an untamed commander in chief is being taken deadly seriously by European leaders that hisnational security strategyhas vowed to replace with right-wing populists.

The showdown is stranger still because Greenland is NATO territory. Trump’s claims that Denmark can’t defend it make no sense: Denmark is part of the world’s most powerful military alliance. Any attack on the island would be regarded as an attack on all NATO members under a mutual defense guarantee.

The worst that could have happened in the talks with JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio was a blow-up to recall the vice president’s dressing-down of Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky last year. Such a disaster seems to have been avoided, although the obviously worried delegation emerged to say there’s still a “fundamental disagreement” on what should happen to Greenland.

Later, in the Oval Office, the president complained that he needed Greenland for his proposed Golden Dome missile shield, and warned that Russia and China were readying to move into the territory, where there is already a US base.

He was also cruelly scathing about the military prowess of a brave NATO ally that sent its troops to die alongside Americans in post-9/11 wars because of the same “an attack on one is an attack on all” mantra that Denmark and all other members invoked to the benefit of the US after the al-Qaeda attacks in 2001.

“They put an extra dog sled there last month. They added a second dog sled. That’s not going to do the trick,” Trump said.

Over the course of the day, the Greenland crisis took an even more extraordinary turn. Denmark said it was sending extra military personnel to the island, and its Scandinavian cousins signed up too. Sweden is dispatching an unspecified number of troops to the island. Norway is deploying two people.Germany announcedit would send 13 military personnel on an “exploration mission” to join their NATO comrades.

French President Emmanuel Macron announced Wednesday evening that he’d sent French forces to join the hastily organized Operation Arctic Endurance in Greenland. “Initial French military elements are already en route. Others will follow,” he wrote on X.

Such deployments are obviously symbolic; they wouldn’t be much of a match for the mighty US armed forces. But the symbolism is staggering nonetheless. European states are sending their men to make a show of defending NATO territory, not from Russia or China or a terror group, but from the president of the United States — the Western alliance’s most crucial and powerful leader.

So what happens next? Does Trump keep up his pressure to try to force Denmark to sell Greenland — though he’s offered no plan for where he’d come up with the hundreds of billions of dollars that would likely involve?

Or is he going to follow up his audacious raid that toppled Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro by sending US forces to seize the territory? Such a venture would pose a stark dilemma for Pentagon top brass who run NATO.

Trump isn’t saying.

“We’re going to see what happens with Greenland,” Trump said, rolling out a favorite catchphrase while adopting his frequent pose as an outsider commenting on events in which he is the sole deciding actor.

The rest of the world is getting a taste of life in America over five years, across two Trump terms. They are faced with a president who governs by whim and whose strategy is to have no apparent strategy but keeping everyone guessing.

Trump supporters argue that his unpredictability is a plus; that he’s got the world on edge and rebuilt American power and influence. If he can’t be sure what he’s going to do next, how can US adversaries?

Trump can boast undeniable foreign policy achievements. He inflicted severe damage on Iran’s nuclear program with only negligible reprisals from the Islamic Republic, a step other presidents didn’t dare take. He may have no plan for post-Maduro Venezuela, other thanselling its oil— but the country’s beleaguered, impoverished people will not miss the dictator. And the administrationon Wednesday announcedthe start of phase two of Trump’s Gaza peace plan, focusing on the start of the demilitarization of Hamas and the rebuilding of the Strip.

Yet there’s still a sense that Trump is winging it, like a juggler frantically trying to keep multiple balls in the air at once and only just stopping them from plunging to the ground. Despite a string of successful — and dramatic — military operations, Trump’s luck may not last forever. And hubris might push him too far.

The Iran situation is a perfect example of his impulsive and often impenetrable leadership.

For days, Trump has seemed to be headed on an inexorable path to new military attacks on Iran after warning repeatedly that he will punish the tottering clerical regime for ignoring his warnings not to crack down on protesters.

Every sign pointed to action. The US told some personnel to leave its vast base in the Qatar desert, a possible target of any retaliation. Multiple nations told their citizens to leave Iran and to postpone travel to the region. On Wednesday night, Iran closed its airspace, apparently to make it easier to identify any encroaching US or Israeli war planes. Flight trackers showed streams of jetliners diverting around its territory — normally a busy air lane between Europe and Asia.

For a few hours earlier Tuesday and Wednesday, phone calls were possible from inside Iran to the outside world following communications and Internet blackouts imposed amid some of the most serious-ever protests against the Islamic regime.

“People started calling out,” Nazila Fathi, who worked as a New York Times correspondent in Tehran, told CNN’s Erin Burnett. “It appeared that people were really intimidated by the bloodbath that the regime had waged this week. But in the meantime, they were expecting some kind of military strike,” she said.

For all his bluster, Trump could be having second thoughts. The act of ordering American personnel into combat is wrenching for any president. Any attack on Iran designed to blunt the regime’s machinery of repression would have to be broad and deep. The kind of quick, sharp shock that characterized US strikes in Venezuela and in Iran last year might be ineffective. The US could get dragged into a longer venture at which Trump’s “America First” supporters, already discomfited by his global grabs for power, might balk.

Of course, Trump’s possible blink on military action could be a ruse. Before he struck Iran’s nuclear program last year, he offered the impression that Tehran had days left to make a deal — then sent US stealth bombers on an audacious round-the-world mission to target its nuclear sites.

Yet he’s also created huge expectations for himself.

Previous presidents have been careful to avoid any impression they were calling Iranian protesters onto the streets, in order to avoid offering the regime an excuse to claim they are acting on behalf of the Great Satan, the United States.

Trump has had no such concerns.

“Iranian Patriots, KEEP PROTESTING - TAKE OVER YOUR INSTITUTIONS!!!… HELP IS ON ITS WAY,” the president said in a Truth Social post on Tuesday.

Of course, protesters braving the vicious thuggery of their leaders would perceive this as a call to action and a promise of support.

“If he does nothing, it will be viewed by history as a strategic and moral betrayal because he encouraged protesters to take to the streets for weeks, he kept reassuring Iranians that he had their back, and he watched while thousands of protesters were killed,” Karim Sadjadpour of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace told CNN’s Burnett Wednesday.

“At the same time military action is fraught with risks,” Sadjadpour said. “There’s no silver bullet in which we can cleanly take out the regime and usher in a secular democracy.”

It’s hard to see how the president gets himself off this hook. Threats, bluffs and juggling all the foreign policy balls in the world can only work for so long.

An American president who disdains traditional policy processes, acts on his gut, and says he’s a man of peace while developing an increasing taste for spectacular and violent military action is on the clock.

Like he said, it’s a “crazy world.”