U.S. President Donald Trump, as is well known, withdrew from a plan to launch new large-scale strikes against Iran.
Late on Saturday evening, Trump stated that several countries in the Middle East had asked him to wait, as they had reached “the threshold of an agreement”.
Trump therefore called off the planned attack on Iran’s infrastructure after writing on Truth Social on Saturday evening that the United States had just been asked by Iran and other countries in the Middle East “to refrain from any attack, as the broad outlines of an agreement have been reached”, Breitbart News reports.
“This will include the immediate, complete, and total OPENING OF THE STRAIT OF HORMUZ, as well as an end to Iran’s nuclear weapons threat.
Based on this request, for the benefit of the WORLD in the future, and to ensure the survival of a successful and prosperous Iran, I have agreed to cancel the attack, provided that we are able to reach an AGREEMENT quickly.”
Iranian sources rejected the President’s statement on Sunday, saying that the claim that an agreement was close to being reached was “completely baseless”.
“The Islamic Republic of Iran has not entered into any agreement to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, and the reports published about this are false,” a military source in Tehran told the country’s semi-official Fars News Agency.
“As long as the United States continues its hostile actions and aggression, the Strait of Hormuz will remain closed.”
The Iran war appears to have turned into a quagmire for Trump. It is difficult to win a war against military forces that completely disregard their own civilian population.
Trump will come under pressure if petrol prices rise, and he cannot ignore the midterm elections in November either. Moreover, opposition to the war is growing in the United States, and deploying troops on the ground appears entirely out of the question, as doing so would likely cost the lives of too many American soldiers.
The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has no elections to worry about, takes no account of the civilian population, and is willing to sacrifice its own soldiers.
Trump is said to have been persuaded by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia.
On Sunday, the state-run Saudi Press Agency reported that bin Salman “stressed the need to prioritise dialogue in order to de-escalate the situation, as well as the importance of doing everything possible to create calm that paves the way for diplomatic solutions.”