Iran appears to be defeating US President Donald Trump at his own game, analysts say. On Monday, Trump alleged that Iran could not be trusted to abide by any deal — yet he had himself earlier broken a memorandum of understanding meant to halt the war. In an interview with Fox News, Trump said it had been a final deal, that Iran had broken it and that they always break deals; the comment, despite his own record of walking away from multiple international agreements, exposed a self-contradiction, analysts said. In their view, the current US crisis stems from Trump’s decision in his first term to scrap the Obama-era Iran nuclear deal.
Later, when Trump threatened to impose his own toll on ships passing through the Strait of Hormuz, Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, mocked him on the social platform X, writing that Trump had legitimised Tehran’s position on charging Hormuz tolls, but that a 20 percent toll was far too high and Iran would keep a fair fee. Analysts said Trump was now realising that Iran was negotiating hard and interpreting the memorandum’s language to suit itself. On a radio show on Monday, Trump changed his tone and claimed the deal had been a test that Iran had failed and that it had no value.
The main reason the memorandum collapsed, the report said, was effective control of the Strait of Hormuz, which is Iran’s biggest gain of the war, with Tehran using its geography and the clever application of limited power to outmanoeuvre a superpower. Iran had seized the advantage created by the loose language drafted by Trump’s inexperienced negotiating team, led by Vice-President JD Vance, and the deal’s 60-day deadline for a full nuclear agreement was completely unrealistic. Although daily tit-for-tat attacks mean the situation could spiral out of control at any time, a full-scale war may still be avoidable, as Trump is unwilling to risk major damage such as striking Iran’s oil-production hub on Kharg Island. Although a mistaken US strike early in the war killed 168 children and 14 teachers at an Iranian school, Trump has so far not carried out major attacks on civilian infrastructure such as bridges or power plants, and Iran has kept its retaliatory strikes on US bases and neighbouring countries within certain limits. The war has not yet gone completely out of control, but after nearly five months Trump still has no answer to how he will extricate himself from it.
বাংলায় মূল প্রতিবেদন পড়ুন · Read the original Bengali report