The great ancient Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu taught that warriors who lured their enemy into a trap should leave a way of escape to save face and avoid a desperate battle to the death. The conservative House members seeking to trap Speaker Kevin McCarthy into a hard-line position on federal spending as a government shutdown approached may have forgotten that principle. Last week, Matt Gaetz and his band of rebels blocked a right-wing stopgap spending measure, leaving McCarthy with just one option for keeping the government funded and maintaining his power as Speaker: cutting a deal with Democrats. So that’s exactly what he did on Saturday, leaving Washington in shock at his abrupt about-face after many months of talking tough on spending and making endless concessions to keep the nihilists of his conference at bay.

A more cynical interpretation of the hard-liners’ strategy is that this is precisely the outcome they wanted, despite their own tough talk about how they welcomed a shutdown. By pushing McCarthy into the arms of Democrats, they made it easier to eject him from the Speakership; now they can argue he’s so weak and unprincipled that he’d make concessions to the hated enemy just to save himself. If that was indeed the idea, it will be tested this week. Gaetz confirmed Sunday on CNN’s State of the Union that he intends to file a motion to vacate the chair against McCarthy in the coming days. Quite a few exasperated conservatives seem ready to take away the Speaker’s gavel; 90 House Republicans voted against the “clean” stopgap bill that passed the House and Senate on September 30. So McCarthy will have to turn to Democrats to save him once again. That means the Speaker will have to allow more concessions on spending and other Democrat priorities, or perhaps make good on promises he’s already made privately to keep the government open.

All this is fertile ground in which Republican grievances with McCarthy might grow, with important outsiders like Donald Trump (and perhaps other presidential candidates angling for hard-core conservative votes) destructively encouraging maximum opposition to any sort of congressional bipartisanship.

Despite Democrats coming to McCarthy’s aid, the two parties are still far apart on spending levels and a variety of side issues (most prominently aid to Ukraine). The government could still shut down when the 45-day stopgap measure expires, or soon thereafter. In the meantime, McCarthy will continue to face serial motions to vacate from the hard-liners, and Democrats at any given moment could decide to stop bailing him out — or worse yet, to force him into the kind of humiliating concessions that will feed the House Republican revolt against him.

So McCarthy is hardly out of the woods, and neither is the federal government. We haven’t really seen any sort of outbreak of bipartisanship in Congress. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (who’s presumably in constant communication with Senate Democrat leaders and the White House) made a calculated decision to throw McCarthy a life preserver in order to avoid a shutdown and secure some big (and perhaps still undisclosed) concessions, but anything could happen now. Suffice it to say that even if he survives the immediate right-wing push to eject him from his chair, McCarthy’s chances of remaining Speaker though another Republican leadership election are low. At the moment, the Californian is benefitting from intraparty anger at Gaetz and other rebels who are negotiating with Democrats to get support for a motion to vacate the chair even as they fulminate against McCarthy for sleeping with the enemy. But in the longer run, it’s going to be hard for many of them to look at McCarthy’s Speakership as anything other than an ongoing slow-motion riot that breaks into chaos whenever big decisions have to be made.