- The US president has said a peace deal could be imminent on dozens of occasions. What’s behind it?
Leaving an NBA finals game in New York, United States President Donald Trump made a familiar claim: a peace deal with Iran was “two or three days” away.
Within 48 hours, American bombs were falling on Iran.
The strikes, launched by the US on Thursday morning, targeted “military surveillance capabilities, communication systems, and air defence sites across Iran,” according to the US military’s Central Command.
Local media in Iran reported strikes in several cities in southern Iran and attacks in multiple cities near Tehran.
In response, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) said it had attacked 18 US military targets in Kuwait, Bahrain, and Jordan. IRGC said it would fire at any vessel attempting to pass through the Strait of Hormuz, an essential trade route that typically carries around 20 per cent of the world’s oil, but has been largely closed for months.
These attacks are the latest development in an escalating exchange of strikes that threatens to reignite a full-scale war, which was paused in early April when the two sides agreed to a fragile ceasefire.
Trump told Fox News that an Iranian official asked him to stop the attacks, but the US will “bomb the sh-t out of them tomorrow” if Iran does not sign a deal to end the war.
So what could Trump’s rhetoric about a deal really mean?
Thirty-eight times and counting
The warning comes after months of Trump repeatedly insisting a deal with Iran was imminent — in fact, at least 38 times since March, according to CNN.
Trump’s remarks on a potential peace deal with Iran, which would end the war, open the Strait of Hormuz, and heavily restrict Iran’s nuclear ambitions, have been coming up since March in multiple interviews and social media posts.
First, on 23 March, during the first round of US-Israeli strikes in Iran, Trump announced “very strong talks” between these countries.
Days later, he added that Iran is “begging” to make a deal, and since then, almost as a routine, he has repeatedly said the deal is just around the corner, sometimes just days away.
On Sunday, US vice president JD Vance told CBS News that the Iran deal is “very close”, but it could happen in the next week or months.
David Smith, associate professor at the University of Sydney’s United States Studies Centre, said at first these remarks were “a way of calming down markets”.
“It still has some effect on markets, but it has less effect on markets now than it used to because of the fact that we’ve seen Trump say that there is a deal close so many times and then there never is,” he said.
‘Happened too many times’
Smith suggests the intended audience of Trump’s messages that a deal is imminent has been the US public.
“I think that is for Trump’s domestic political audience,” Smith said.
“Americans are very wary of this war, and they’re very wary of it turning into a really protracted conflict. So he just keeps telling them that a deal is close, that it’s not going to be a long war.”
Multiple polls in the US have confirmed that the war has negatively impacted Trump’s popularity.
According to a recent report by the US-based think tank, the Pew Research Center, 59 per cent of people in the US believe the US made the “wrong decision” in attacking Iran.
A recent poll by The Economist and YouGov showed that 92 per cent of people in the US believe the war will last a month longer than it has already at more than three months, while 62 per cent believe Trump was ineffective in the negotiations.
Smith said those in the US no longer believe Trump’s claims that a deal is close.
“It’s happened too many times. The first few times, people thought maybe there was a deal close, but now that Trump says it so frequently, people just don’t seem to believe it anymore,” he said.
“I don’t think that even his supporters believe anymore that there is a deal just around the corner.”
Iran has ‘run rings around’ the US
Now, with the recent escalation of the war between the US and the Iranian regime, concerns are growing that the deal is even more out of reach.
Tensions escalated on Monday when Iran attacked Israel in retaliation for Israeli strikes in Lebanon, which Iran claimed violated the ceasefire agreement.
In response, Israel launched multiple strikes across Iran, described as its largest bombing campaign in Iran since the ceasefire took effect in April.
On Wednesday, the US started bombing areas in Iran after accusing Iran of shooting down a US helicopter over the Persian Gulf, and those attacks continued on Thursday.
Dara Conduit, a lecturer in political science at the University of Melbourne, told SBS News that this is considered “another cycle of escalation”.
“I think the US is engaging in these attacks largely because it can’t allow Iran’s escalation over the last few days to go unanswered,” she said.
“I think Iran has, in many ways, run rings around the United States in this war and in these attempts to get a ceasefire agreement.
“The fact that it has openly attacked both Israel and the US over recent days is something that I think the US couldn’t let go unanswered.”
While US officials have said the strikes will not affect negotiations between the countries, Iranian officials have not yet expressed their stance on talks following the two-sided strikes.
After the first day of the US attacks on Wednesday, Iran’s foreign ministry spokesperson Esmaell Baghaei said they will “reassess” their position in talks.
Conduit said this flare-up of the conflict “is really a symptom of the shaky ground that the ceasefire and the peace talks are taking place on.”
“This will fuel voices inside Iran that the talks and ceasefire process are meaningless and that the US is not a good-faith negotiating partner,” she said.
“There are lots of actors inside Iran, particularly among the Revolutionary Guards and hardline aspects of the state, that are not supportive of the peace talks. And the way that the US has acted over the last two years, while undertaking talks with Iran, has only strengthened this view.”
@SBS News
