Keeping a low profile doesn’t come naturally to Donald Trump.
Key Statements
The mercurial American president has, for the moment, muted both his threats of apocalyptic strikes and promises of imminent diplomatic breakthroughs messages that have been in constant rotation since he launched the war with Israel more than five months ago. At the end of July, Washington announced new measures targeting Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps , the ideological arm of the Iranian military. That could be a tactical shift for an American president who, until recently, was threatening to unleash the most devastating strikes since World War II against Iran.
Yet that is the strategy the American president says he now favors in the war against Iran, and he is betting on economic pressure over diplomacy or new strikes.
Political Context
“Iran is in terrible shape economically. It can’t ship oil at any meaningful level.
“Iran is broke, totally broke and they’re not paying their soldiers,” Trump said Monday in the Oval Office. And it still labors under sanctions and still can’t access its overseas assets,” said Michael O’Hanlon, an expert from the Brookings Institution think tank. Iran’s foreign ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baqaei called the fresh push for sanctions a “retreat,” noting the country has withstood US sanctions for decades. “Whenever Washington proves itself incapable of pursuing diplomacy it retreats into sanctions; and whenever those sanctions fail to produce results, it simply increases the dose,” Baqaei said in an X post this week.
