We already knew Donald Trump’s bombing campaign against Yemen was unconstitutional. It turns out it was completely pointless too.

Earlier this week, Trump and the Houthi leadership of Yemen announced a sudden cease-fire deal that took many by surprise, with the US president declaring that the Houthis “don’t wanna fight anymore” and had “capitulated.” After two months of often indiscriminate US bombing, Trump told reporters, the Houthis said they “will not be blowing up ships anymore, and that’s what the purpose of what we were doing” was, so the United States “will honor that.”

The deal has been a rare bit of good news on the foreign policy front, for both Americans, who are tired of being sucked into endless warfare in the Middle East and elsewhere, and for innocent Yemenis, many dozens of whom have been killed by US bombs the past two months. But stop and think about it for a second, and Trump’s cease-fire announcement looks less like a grand accomplishment of presidential diplomacy and more like a fictionalized George H. W. Bush writing the final line of his memoirs in the Simpsons: “Since I’d achieved all of my goals as president in one term, there was no need for a second.”