WASHINGTON, DC – On Monday morning, as the bacon and eggs were sizzling in the White House mess, US President Donald Trump stared into the abyss and decided not to jump in, nor to bring the rest of the world along with him.
“Trump Always Chickens Out”, or Taco, is the Wall Street axiom for how the President typically responds when the going gets tough. So as he contemplated a situation of his own creation, in which the US military was just hours away from awaiting his orders to bomb Iran’s energy and power facilities, Trump kicked the ball into the long grass.
The news was broken – where else – on his social media feed, in a dispatch written so hastily that it was all in block capitals, rather than the usual random use of upper and lower case lettering. To Washington’s enormous surprise, Trump claimed that previously undisclosed talks had been occurring all weekend with “THE COUNTRY OF IRAN” (although notably he did not use the word “GOVERNMENT” to describe his mystery interlocutors).
The talks, he claimed, took place “OVER THE LAST TWO DAYS” and were “VERY GOOD AND PRODUCTIVE CONVERSATIONS REGARDING A COMPLETE AND TOTAL RESOLUTION OF OUR HOSTILITIES IN THE MIDDLE EAST”. Whether the talks were direct or involved a third party, the President did not divulge.
Notably, the message made no reference to the Strait of Hormuz, and the Iranian attacks that sparked his 48-hour deadline – issued only on Saturday – for the regime to reopen the strategic waterway, or else sit back and watch Iran’s power plants destroyed by US and Israeli missiles. The government in Tehran threatened reprisals that led some oil and gas traders to warn of an “Armageddon scenario” for energy markets, given that last week the regime’s armaments, at a stroke, wiped out nearly 20 per cent of Qatar’s liquefied natural gas export capacity at an estimated cost of $20bn to the emirate’s economy.
It is a measure of Trump’s evaporating credibility that Washington insiders immediately wondered whether talks with Iranian officials had really taken place over the weekend, or were a convenient fiction promulgated by a retreating American leader in the face of possible stock market meltdown. Also possibly on the presidential mind, the latest opinion poll for CBS News which shows 67 per cent of Americans are not willing to pay higher fuel prices caused by the war, and 57 per cent of the country believes the conflict is going “very or somewhat badly” for the United States.
In comments to reporters, Trump claimed Special Envoy Steve Witkoff and his son-in-law Jared Kushner were engaged in talks with a “top person” in Iran, who he refused to identify. Trump indicated the person was not the country’s new Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, but said the discussions were taking place by telephone and were “very strong talks”.
Tehran responded rapidly to the President’s claims. Its Tasnim news agency said that Trump had folded “after Iran’s military threats became credible… There have been no negotiations, and none are underway”, it reported. Another Iranian news agency, Mizan, reported that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said no engagements with the United States are actively underway, and called Trump’s climbdown an attempt “to reduce energy prices and to buy time”.
There was no mention in Trump’s message of any kind of broader ceasefire while the alleged talks with Iran continue. The New York Times noted that his decision to delay military action until the end of the week came shortly after the 10-Year Treasury bond yield rose to almost 4.5 per cent – the same threshold that led the US leader to walk back some of his most severe tariff threats last spring. The yield immediately fell to a more tolerable 4.35 per cent as traders learned of the President’s decision. The Dow Jones Industrial Average also recovered, climbing nearly 2 per cent in value when markets opened in New York.
Where Trump’s decision leaves the conflict is as unclear as anything he has said in recent days. He has, on occasion, claimed that he is “winding down” military operations against Iran. But he has also ordered 2,500 US more Marines to head to the region. By the time his current five-day window for talks expires, there will be more than 4,500 of them in the conflict’s theatre, fuelling speculation that he is still considering the deployment of ground troops to try to secure the Strait, and possibly also to recover Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium.
Underscoring the haste with which Trump was acting on Monday, two separate versions of his statement appeared on Truth Social. In the first, published at 7.05am Washington time, there was a glaring spelling mistake: he wrote of “CONVERSATIONS WITCH WILL CONTINUE THROUGHOUT THE WEEK”. Eighteen minutes later, the message was reposted with the word “which” correctly spelled.
It’s a funny way to run a war, and the morning’s developments only further underscored the extemporising that lies at the heart of the President’s military strategy. But at least he’s not marching the world towards Armageddon.
At least, not today.
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