US President Donald Trump took two apparently divergent tones in the same set of sentence, again, on Sunday amid the stalemate in his West Asia war. He threatened to “knock out every single Power Plant, and every single Bridge” in Iran, while “offering a very fair and reasonable deal” with a second round of talks in Pakistan on Monday.
“Iran decided to fire bullets yesterday in the Strait of Hormuz — A Total Violation of our Ceasefire Agreement! Many of them were aimed at a French Ship, and a Freighter from the United Kingdom. That wasn’t nice, was it?” Trump wrote on the social media platform Truth Social.
Trump’s latest ‘Truth’
“My Representatives are going to Islamabad, Pakistan — They will be there tomorrow evening, for Negotiations,” read the next sentence.
And then it got progressively menacing: “Iran recently announced that they were closing the Strait, which is strange, because our BLOCKADE has already closed it. They’re helping us without knowing, and they are the ones that lose with the closed passage, $500 Million Dollars a day! The United States loses nothing. In fact, many Ships are headed, right now, to the U.S., Texas, Louisiana, and Alaska, to load up, compliments of the IRGC, always wanting to be ‘the tough guy!’”
He added that the US was offering, as he put it, “a very fair and reasonable DEAL”.
With it came the threat: “I hope they take it because, if they don’t, the United States is going to knock out every single Power Plant, and every single Bridge, in Iran. NO MORE MR. NICE GUY! They’ll come down fast, they’ll come down easy and, if they don’t take the DEAL, it will be my Honor to do what has to be done, which should have been done to Iran, by other Presidents, for the last 47 years. IT’S TIME FOR THE IRAN KILLING MACHINE TO END!”
Truce is shaky
The US-Iran conflict, which began with American and Israeli airstrikes on Tehran on February 28, entered a fragile ceasefire last to last week after intense escalation.
That was after Trump had threatened to destroy Iran’s entire civilian infrastructure and ominously warned that “a whole civilization will die tonight” unless Tehran agreed to a deal. He had also threatened to “take out the entire country” of Iran “in one night”.
Hours before his self-imposed deadline for Iran to reopen the Strait Hormuz — the key oil-transport waterway that’s Tehran’s major leverage in the conflict — Pakistan brokered a two-week ceasefire, under which Iran agreed to allow passage through the Strait of Hormuz.
The first round of talks in Pak capital Islamabad last weekend, however, did not yield any results.
The truce, thus, has been shaky. The US has put its own blockade on ships in the strait.
Iran declared the strait “fully open” on Friday, only to reimpose restrictions on Saturday, citing “repeated breaches of trust” by the US, which it accused of maintaining a naval blockade only on Iranian vessels and ports despite the ceasefire.
