If Trump wanted war with Iran, he wouldn't have fired Bolton. I think he's afraid of war with Iran, and for that I say hallelujah.
But this is realpolitik.
Setting aside my strong preference for US withdrawal,
- if the US wants to muck about in the Middle East, it's going to be attacked
- if Iran wants to be the attacker, it's going to suffer retaliations.
They know that, and their capacity for escalating is limited. They can have other guys over there do more of the same, and that's about it. And we'll retaliate about the same, and that's about it.
This is a semi pre-emptive de-escalation move, or at least an attempt at one.
That said, a "war with Iran" could possibly be one of the worst blunders a US administration could make with the world for at least a decade.
The best way to solve the problem is not intervene with war, but just allow father time to do it's work.
For starters, the "conflict" is irrational. It is nothing more than a bunch of angry resentful old men with grudges who want to kill each other over shit that happened before most of us were born. The aggression towards Iran for the last 70 years is baseless. Coups, sanctions, chemical attacks, terrorist attacks, assassinations, all directed at Iran for nothing. John Bolton and Hillary Clinton still think people need to die over the hostage crisis.
Young Iranians are simply fed up with their authoritarian regime, and young Americans are fed up with ours. That "fed up-ness" just hasn't had the time to reach halls of power run by bitter men with homicidal axes to grind.
But time marches on, and those old men are inevitably going to age out some day. The problem is, we got some asshole US president trying to blow up Iran which can only mean another generation of Iranians growing up hating the US (and rightly justified in doing so).