While the outcome of talks between the United States and Iran hangs in the balance, there is no question that on Monday at least, Tehran enjoyed the advantage over Washington.
The remaining key figures in the Iranian government can surely not have believed their luck, as Donald Trump announced that a weekend of secret talks had created an opportunity to shelve his plan to launch military strikes targeting Iran’s energy infrastructure.
Sadly for Trump, Washington largely responded by wondering whether he was even telling the truth.
Scepticism about the president’s comments, which came in a social media posting conveniently published just two hours before the US financial markets were set to open, was the inevitable result of ongoing contradictions and constantly shifting narratives at the heart of the US leader’s efforts to find a way out of the military thicket into which he voluntarily thrust himself.
Rather like Vladimir Putin launching Russia’s war on Ukraine four years ago, Trump imagined the conflict in Iran would be over in 72, or maybe 96 hours. He was hoping to repeat the lightning success he enjoyed removing President Nicholas Maduro from power in Venezuela, and moving swiftly on.
But Iran is no Venezuela, and as the war entered its fourth full week, the Iranian regime was still demonstrating military capacity to fire ballistic missiles at Israel, at its neigbours, and even as far away as the US-UK military base in Diego Garcia. So much for the “total obliteration” of the country’s military capacity that led Trump, only on Friday afternoon, to contemplate “winding down our great Military efforts in the Middle East”.
Of course, the weekend also witnessed much bravado as he set his 48-hour deadline for Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, or else “America will hit and obliterate their various POWER PLANTS, STARTING WITH THE BIGGEST ONE FIRST!”
Trump speaks with US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth at Memphis Air National Guard Base, where he said a ’15-point agreement’ had been reached (Photo: Kevin Lamarque/Reuters)But by Monday morning, the man who – on Friday – excoriated Nato for being a “PAPER TIGER”, proved that he is no slouch in the paper tiger stakes himself. His climb-down in the face of soaring energy prices and sinking poll numbers communicated to Tehran that the regime held the winning cards. Simply by turning the freedom of the Strait into a matter of global economic necessity, the remaining Ayatollahs atop the government had tapped into what they must still hope is a winning formula to force Trump from the battlefield.
By the end of Monday, Iran maintained that talk about discussions with the ‘Great Satan’ was “fake news”. The Speaker of the Iranian Parliament, Mohammed Ghalibaf, widely reported to be the “top person” with whom Trump’s envoys were communicating, insisted on social media that “no negotiations with America have taken place”. Any suggestion to the contrary, he said, was an effort to “manipulate financial and oil markets and to escape the quagmire in which America and Israel are trapped”.
But Ghalibaf appears at least to have engaged in indirect conversations with US officials, mediated by third parties, along similar lines to the talks that were underway in Geneva just 48 hours before the conflict began. Rumours suggest the key players in the discussions, including US Special Envoy Steve Witkoff and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner may descend on Islamabad before the weekend in an effort to secure some kind of deal.
Trump claimed on Monday that a “fifteen-point agreement” has already been struck with the Iranians. “They want peace”, he told an audience in Memphis, though the only element of the deal that he unveiled was Iran’s agreement “that they will not have a nuclear weapons”.
In fact, the Iranians made that pledge during the Geneva talks last month, and repeatedly in the days leading up the conflict. Precisely why the Americans walked away from those negotiations still remains unclear.
Even as more talks were being mooted, Trump continued to flow additional military assets to the Middle East. By the end of the week, the US Marine presence there will have swelled to 4,500 troops, stoking speculation that the president is still considering a high-stakes boots-on-the-ground deployment either to force the reopening of the Strait, or to try and secure the country’s stockpile of enriched uranium.
In Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu moved to create distance between himself and any US -brokered peace deal. After speaking with Trump, he made a carefully worded TV address that avoided offering any enthusiasm for dialogue with Ghalibaf or any other Iranian leader.
“President Trump believes there is an opportunity to leverage the tremendous achievements we have attained with the US military to realize the war’s objectives in…an agreement that will safeguard our vital interests”, he said. “At the same time, we continue to strike both in Iran and Lebanon”.
In an astonishing coincidence of history, Trump spent part of Monday touring Graceland, home to the late Elvis Presley. Asked by reporters to identify his favourite Elvis song, the president immediately lit upon “Hurt”, a ballad about the corrosive impact of lies on relationships.
“I’m so hurt/To think that you lied to me/I’m hurt,/Way down deep inside of me….”
Some of Trump’s jilted supporters, struggling to identify an “America First” imperative in the war on Iran, may find themselves empathising with the King’s lyrics, and hoping that a peace agreement, no matter how opportunistic, might allow them to rekindle their admiration for the Maga movement’s leader.
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