The US president claims progress in talks with Iran, but uncertainty persists. Meanwhile, Israel advances West Bank annexation under cover of a crisis<\/p>\n
It must be tough for Donald Trump: starting a war with Iran, but finding it terribly inconvenient to finish\u00a0it before collecting a shiny prize<\/a> from Benjamin\u00a0Netanyahu or sharing<\/a> a stage with\u00a0China\u2019s Xi\u00a0Jinping. In war, as in peace, timing is everything. With the global economy teetering on fears of an uncontrolled escalation in attacks on electricity, oil and gas installations in the Gulf, Mr Trump revealed that he was having such \u201cproductive\u201d conversations with Tehran that there would be a five-day pause in US strikes on \u201cIranian power plants and energy infrastructure<\/a>\u201d. The trouble is that Mr Trump\u2019s talks may not exist. Tehran denies having them.<\/p>\n If real, they would be a welcome de-escalatory step. They are also an admission that Mr Trump\u2019s threat risked consequences more damaging than its intended target. But it also means that after markets close on Friday, Mr Trump could return to \u201cbombing our little hearts out<\/a>\u201d. It is as unsurprising as it is grotesque that the US president would speak so lightly of potentially killing hundreds of civilians. Neither is Mr Trump likely to have been telling the truth in claiming \u201cmajor points of agreement<\/a>\u201d in talks with Iran, including commitments on nuclear weapons and the reopening of the strait of Hormuz.<\/p>\n Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters<\/a> section, please click here<\/a>.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n Continue reading…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The US president claims progress in talks with Iran, but uncertainty persists. Meanwhile, Israel advances West Bank annexation under cover of a crisis It must be tough for Donald Trump: starting a war with Iran, but finding it terribly inconvenient to finish\u00a0it before collecting a shiny prize from Benjamin\u00a0Netanyahu or sharing a stage with\u00a0China\u2019s Xi\u00a0Jinping. … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-69761","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69761","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=69761"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69761\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=69761"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=69761"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=69761"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}