The ceasefire reopened diplomacy, but it also left Washington to manage Iran’s leverage, Israel’s attacks and a MAGA backlash.
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President Donald Trump’s effort to strike a deal with Iran faced significant headwinds on Sunday, as Tehran flexed its control of the Strait of Hormuz, Israel and Hezbollah traded strikes and the right flank of Trump’s party continued to accuse him of making too many concessions to secure an agreement.
The challenges underscored the difficulty of Trump’s task as he seeks to turn a fragile ceasefire into a lasting agreement after months of war sent energy prices skyrocketing.
Ending the fighting addressed Trump’s immediate concerns about oil prices and the stock markets, but it left unresolved the question at the heart of the conflict: what limits, if any, Iran will accept on its nuclear program. Vice President JD Vance is set to meet Sunday with senior Iranian leaders in hopes of keeping Iran from ever obtaining a nuclear weapon in exchange for sanctions relief.
Trump may have less leverage than he did during talks in February before the war. Then, Iranian leaders feared a U.S. attack could topple the regime. Now the government has proved it can survive, even after the Feb. 28 killing of its supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Trump has made clear that a halt to oil shipping out of the Persian Gulf is a pressure point. And Tehran has shown that it can send shocks through global energy markets with just the threat of attacks on ships.
Vance and other senior U.S. officials seeking a breakthrough at the bargaining table must haggle over the many issues Trump deferred to halt the fighting and reopen the Strait of Hormuz — restoring what amounted to the status quo before the initial U.S. strikes on Feb. 28. The concessions the White House has already offered to get back to the bargaining table have become a central line of attack for Trump’s critics.
Trump is no longer demanding regime change, despite promising Iranians that help was on the way. He says he understands why the country needs ballistic missiles, upsetting U.S. allies who feel threatened by those weapons. And he has made clear he wants to avoid anything that would derail the stock market’s upward trajectory.
“There’s not a lot of room now for him to maneuver to go back and punch back at the Iranians,” said Aaron David Miller, an expert on U.S.-Israeli relations, who has advised Republican and Democratic administrations on Middle East policy.
Pressuring Iran “means essentially resuming the war or reimposing the naval blockade, but those have consequences,” he said, including ones Trump has said he is eager to avoid.
“We have so undermined our own deterrence with Iran,” Miller said.
The elder Khamenei long tried to avoid a situation where the U.S. and Israel teamed up in a weeks-long campaign against Iran. “Well, guess what, they lived through that, and they not only survived, they found a way to keep the regime coherent,” Miller said.
The stakes for Trump and the Republican Party are high. The inflation exacerbated by the conflict has put pressure on many of Trump’s supporters, pushing him to try to get the economy back under control by the midterm elections in November.
A Fox News poll released last week found that 58 percent of voters thought the U.S. made the wrong decision in taking military action against Iran in February. Seventy-five percent of Republicans believed it was the right call, and 35 percent of voters approved of how he was handling Iran.
Still, Vance declared optimism as he set out Saturday for meetings, two days after they were initially scheduled with fighting between Israel and Hezbollah straining the initial agreement.
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“It’s going to be something we’re just going to have to continuously manage to ensure that, you know, Israel and Lebanon are both safe and secure. That’s fundamentally the goal of this, to make the whole region safe and secure,” Vance told reporters Saturday before departing Washington.
“I think we’re going to hopefully make progress on the nuclear issue, make progress on the Lebanon ceasefire issue. Those are the two big things that I think we’re going to be focused on,” he said.
Iran’s repeated declarations that it would close the Strait of Hormuz were a measure of the challenges confronting the Trump administration’s diplomatic efforts. Before Feb. 28, Iran’s leverage over the narrow shipping chokepoint was theoretical and had never been tested.
Now, Iran has shown that it can use mines and drones to halt traffic that includes 20 percent of the world’s supply of oil and natural gas. Trump said last week that his concerns about global energy prices and dwindling oil reserves were a major factor in his decision to seek a peace deal when he did.
Iran said Saturday that it had closed the strait because of its anger over Israeli attacks on Hezbollah. The U.S. military said the waterway was still open to traffic, and Kpler, a tracking firm, said it had logged 20 ship crossings, down from the 130 daily average before the war. Even without attacking any ships, Iran can still throttle traffic, since cautious ship captains may choose not to take chances with Iran’s military and insurance firms may raise their premiums or decline to cover the risk.
Trump on Saturday aired frustration with the situation in the strait, saying on social media that “there will be NO TOLLS in the Hormuz Strait for 60 days during the Cease Fire Period, and there will be NO TOLLS after the 60 day period has expired,” despite Iran’s declaration that it intends to impose new transit fees on ships’ passage through the waterway.
The president threatened to impose U.S. tolls “for services rendered as the Guardian Angel to the countries of the Middle East,” despite the U.S. military having no practical way to collect the charges.
Trump and his backers say Iran’s navy has been destroyed and many of its missile launchers have been eliminated. They argue that Iran’s new leaders, including Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, the son and successor of the late Ali Khamenei, are more willing to make a deal and engage in reforms, and that the country is further from a nuclear weapon than it was before the war.
However, Trump and Vance have been facing increasingly vocal criticism from some of the same people who cheered the initial strikes, especially as both men heated up their rhetoric against Israel last week and criticized it for not following the terms of the deal. Israel has continued to attack what it says are Hezbollah emplacements in Lebanon because its soldiers have come under attack by the Iranian-backed militia. U.S. intelligence agencies have warned that Israel is likely to try to undermine the deal.
The inclusion of a ceasefire in Lebanon in the deal is likely to continue to strain relations between the U.S. and Israel, since it puts Washington in the place of taking Iran’s side over Israel’s on the issue of attacks into Lebanon. As part of the memorandum of understanding, Iran committed to halting Hezbollah’s attacks on Israel. Four Israeli soldiers died when Hezbollah ambushed their tank on Friday in the Lebanese town of Kfar Tebnit.
“If you want [Israel] to go along with the plan, you should tell them what’s in the plan. They were not even in the talks. All of a sudden they are roped into it,” Brian Kilmeade, the host of “Fox & Friends” who is usually a reliable backer of Trump, said on Friday.
“It’s up to Iran to tell Hezbollah, who does whatever you tell them, to knock it off, and then Israel will knock it off,” Kilmeade said.
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