US It For It It’s hard to know if this is reality speaking, or the voice of an impatient man, anxious to remove Iran from his most urgent to-do list before King Charles arrives in Washington for a state visit next Monday – and Trump’s much anticipated visit to China not long afterwards.Iran dismissed the president’s suggestion that he was giving Tehran time to come up with a “unified position”, but it seems unlikely that the regime, already bruised and battered by the war, will break the ceasefire, thus inviting more punishment from the air.In the meantime, what are we to make of the Iranian delegation’s reluctance to get on a plane for the short ride to Islamabad?Iran accuses the US of a “breach of commitments” and cites what it called Washington’s “contradictory behaviour”.Donald Trump’s wildly conflicting public pronouncements – threatening apocalyptic punishment one moment and offering an olive branch the next, claiming all the while that Iran has already made significant concessions – have muddied the waters.Iran still complains that it has entered negotiations twice in the past year, only to be attacked by Israel and the United States.But Donald Trump’s Truth Social post announcing the ceasefire extension, lacking its usual bombast, spoke of an Iranian regime that is “seriously fractured, not unexpectedly”.For a man who has trumpeted the fact that he has already achieved regime change in Iran, was this an admission that Washington is struggling to know who it’s dealing with?Has “regime fracture” made the business of diplomacy with Iran – never the easiest art to master – that much more difficult?Deliberately or not, the president, through his choice of words, briefly joined a debate that has been raging among seasoned Iran watchers in recent days: who’s in charge in Iran now that so much of the old leadership is gone?Why and how is US blockading Iranian ports in Strait of Hormuz?The insider trading suspicions looming over Trump’s presidencyIran sees mass redundancies from war with US and IsraelMiddle EastIranUnited StatesIran war
