Over a single weekend, the White House message to Tehran swung three ways. Donald Trump floated a fresh round of military action, dangled a sweeping agreement, and then on Sunday told reporters that nothing would happen, at least not that day.
His latest remarks came on the South Lawn, just before he flew off to speak to supporters in Michigan. When reporters pressed him on whether bombs could fall again that same day, he first wondered aloud why he would give that away, then said plainly that Sunday would pass without one. Only a day before, he had described an attack as something being weighed for “maybe tomorrow”, while holding out the prospect of a grand bargain with Tehran. Any outcome, he insisted, must keep Iran from ever getting the bomb, and for good.
His rhetoric had already escalated on Friday, when he joked to a crowd about a sequel to Epic Fury, the codename of the joint US-Israeli campaign that started on 28 February and killed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. Speaking to Fox News, Trump reduced his options to a deal or finishing the job, and claimed American forces now run the Strait of Hormuz.
Iranian officials answered in kind. Abbas Araghchi, Iran’s top diplomat, said Tehran’s course would stay the same with or without another war and argued that lasting calm in the Gulf requires foreign forces to leave. Ghalibaf, who heads the parliament, vowed that any attack on Iranian soil would be met with a response the enemy could not imagine. The army separately said it had downed a US drone near Bandar Abbas, a claim that has not been independently verified.
The standoff follows a series of broken arrangements. An 8 April ceasefire halted the heaviest fighting, and a memorandum agreed in June was supposed to pave the way to a final settlement before it fell apart. Mediators are still trying to coax both governments back to formal talks.
