A week that began with Donald Trump threatening to dramatically escalate his war with Iran now sees him striving to do the opposite.
We are a mere three days removed from Mr Trump’s warning that he would start to “obliterate” Iran’s electricity infrastructure in 48 hours unless it “fully opened” the Strait of Hormuz.
That demand was not met. But with 12 hours left before the deadline yesterday, Mr Trump gave Iran a five-day reprieve, citing apparent negotiations with someone inside the regime.
Officially, Iran says no such talks have taken place, and Mr Trump has declined to identify the interlocutors. But he once again insisted, today, that some sort of peace deal could be close.
“We’re having, by the way, a tremendous success in Iran. We had one in Venezuela, and now we’re having one in Iran,” Mr Trump told reporters at the White House.
“They have no navy left, they have no air force left, they have no anti-aircraft equipment left, or radar left, no leaders left. The leaders are all gone, nobody knows who to talk to.
“But we’re actually talking to the right people, and they want to make a deal so badly. You have no idea how badly they want to make a deal. And we’ll see what happens.”
We continue to get mixed messages from the US government. Those remarks above came at about the same time we learned that more than a thousand extra US troops had been ordered to deploy to the Middle East, which would seem to signal an escalation.
But the shift in Mr Trump’s rhetoric is unmistakable. Gone are the threats of apocalyptic destruction. In their place, we now have assertions that the Iranians have “agreed” to never seek nuclear weapons, and that they’re “talking sense”.
He appears to be seeking a way out, a way to end the war while also being able to credibly claim victory. It is no simple task.
Dr Darren Lim, an expert in international relations, teaches at the Australian National University. He told news.com.au there are two essential preconditions to ending the war – or any war, really – and in this case they are particularly hard to achieve.
Condition one: both sides need to conclude that a deal, with all the compromises it might entail, is preferable to more war. And condition two: there must be a “credible” enforcement mechanism to ensure that any deal struck can endure.
“When you are fighting a war, that is a costly thing, obviously. But agreeing to a peace has trade-offs as well,” Dr Lim said.
“If we assume that both sides are acting rationally, in some sense, the calculus of agreeing to a ceasefire and a peace has to be more favourable than continuing fighting.
“It’s clear, I think, from Donald Trump’s point of view, that we’re at a point where he would prefer peace, because peace would mean the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz.”
Dr Lim hosts a podcast called Australia in the World, by the way, which is mostly focused on international affairs. I recommend it.
The strait is a crucial bottleneck; something like a fifth to a quarter of the world’s seaborne oil trade moves through it.
Hence the rising oil prices, this past month. And the reality that the longer the war lasts, the more painful its economic consequences will become.
There are, of course, three parties in this war: the US, Iran and Israel. Dr Lim stressed that while it was “easy to understand the calculation from the US side”, Israel’s interests were “not nearly as clear”, as that country sees Iran as an existential threat.
“This is where the two conditions kind of link up, because what matters to Iran is what’s to stop – whether it’s Israel or the Americans, or anybody else – attacking in the future? This is where the enforcement thing comes in,” he said.
“What they want is not to be attacked a third time. Because they were attacked last year, and they were attacked in February and March this year.
“That assurance can be given through some kind of ceasefire agreement, but the United States is not a credible actor here, because Trump walked away from the Iran nuclear deal in his first term. Clearly, Trump’s promises are not worth the paper they are written on.
“So what Iran needs instead is a strategic dynamic where they feel like – and this is the phrase of establishing deterrence – where they feel like they have a credible promise to inflict pain on the world and on the US, through closing the strait again if necessary.
“What matters above all is that they need to feel confident that they have the ability to close the strait again, if they need to.”
Dr Lim was referring to an agreement struck between Iran and the Obama administration, a decade past, to restrict the country’s nuclear development. Mr Trump tore it up during his first term as president.
There is no sympathy for Iran in that analysis, by the way. It’s just clear-eyed. Iran will not relinquish its control over the strait in return for nothing. Mr Trump, having started the war by calling for regime change, will have to accept some compromises.
What matters is whether those compromises are preferable to ramping up the violence.
“He has recognised that he has reached a limit in escalation,” said Dr Lim.
“He’s recognised that Iran’s threat to retaliate, should their electricity infrastructure be targeted, is a credible one, and is one that he doesn’t want to test.
“The reports that (US Vice President) J.D. Vance is potentially leading negotiations, I think, give us some sense of optimisim, at least right now, that you can see what a resolution might begin to look like.
“So I think he’s reached the brink, and has realised that he does not necessarily control things, and so he’s looking for a pathway to save face and step off this ladder of escalation.”
Mr Trump is, to some extent, at a disadvantage, because he leads a democracy. That makes him more sensitive to external pressures, like the financial markets.
“The mechanisms of political accountability in an autocracy are different. By and large, autocratic regimes can take more pain, because they’re not as accountable to their populations in the same ways,” said Dr Lim.
“That’s not to say they’re not accountable. They are. It’s just a different set of mechanisms they have to respond to.
“So Trump is sensitive to the oil price, he is sensitive to equity, to stock market prices. Whereas the Iranian regime is in a fight for its survival. They have been preparing for this for decades. They know they have to suffer a lot. And they can retaliate with their own pain, and it’s a different political calculus than it is in Washington.”
So, if I may summarise: there are two required conditions for the war to stop. One is that there’s enough common ground, enough overlap in the Venn diagram, for both America and Iran to conclude peace is better than continued hostilities.
The other is that both sides need to believe whatever deal they strike is sustainable. And it’s unclear how Iran could ever feel that condition is fulfilled.
Mr Trump is the wildcard. He flip-flops so frequently, vacillating from over-the-top threats to promises of peace, that he defies prediction.
“The normal rules of what is a rational political calculation, they didn’t apply to him getting into this war, and they don’t apply to him getting out of it,” said Dr Lim.
“The model sort of expects him to make concessions, expects him to climb down, because certainly the Iranians and the Israelis won’t.”
The laws of gravity, as they pertain to politics, still apply, even if the guy in the middle seems to ignore them.
“He is not going to allow this to go for months because it would be catastrophic for for him politically,” Dr Lim said.
“You don’t want to be that confident, because it is still Trump, and we are here, and this is not at a war that any other president would have gotten himself into.
“But there are laws of politics and laws of economic gravity that I still think push us.”
Give it a few more weeks, and we’ll know for sure.
