President Donald Trump said that he had canceled threatened new strikes on Iran — provided a deal was struck “rapidly” with Tehran that included the “Immediate, Complete, and Total” opening of the Strait of Hormuz and “an end to Iran’s nuclear threat.”
In a post on social media late Saturday, Trump said that the U.S. “is locked and loaded and ready to go against the Islamic Republic of Iran,” but that he had agreed to requests by Iran and other Middle Eastern countries “to hold off any attack in that the perimeters of a deal have been agreed to.”
He also claimed that Israel had jointly committed to a pause in fighting.
The Israeli government has not publicly confirmed its agreement.
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi spoke with counterparts in Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan as well as Britain and India, the ministry said in brief readouts of the calls. It said that he told the first three countries that if the United States or Israel attacked, Iran’s armed forces would react forcefully to defend itself and the United States would bear the consequences.
Trump has been wrestling with how to proceed in the war with Iran, now in its sixth month. Weeks of strikes against Iranian military targets have failed to ensure safe passage for commercial vessels in the Strait of Hormuz, the critical waterway for energy that Iran has effectively strangled.
Last week, he set aside, at least temporarily, plans to sharply escalate the U.S. military assault after military advisers warned that a major offensive could dangerously deplete the Pentagon’s already diminished stockpile of Patriot antimissile interceptors and other air defense munitions.
The prospect of a widening war in the Middle East, the vulnerability of key Persian Gulf allies to Iranian attack and a global economic crunch also weighed on the president and his top aides.
Nevertheless, speaking Friday from Camp David, Trump said the United States was weighing additional military action against Iran after days of escalating attacks across the region. “We’ll be hitting them very hard, and you know at some point they’re going to say, ‘We just can’t take it anymore,’” Trump said.
The potential risk of escalation prompted security warnings from the State Department. On Saturday, the U.S. embassies in Jordan, Iraq and Israel urged Americans to consider departing the region or to be prepared to leave if the conflict intensified.
Two senior Iranian officials said Iran has devised a plan to use its proxy militias to escalate attacks on U.S. allies and disrupt global markets if the United States intensified its assaults, in an effort to make the war as costly as possible for Trump. Last week, two gas tankers, including a U.S.-owned vessel, caught fire after an apparent drone attack at an Egyptian port near the Suez Canal, and missiles flew toward a base housing U.S. personnel in Jordan.
On Wednesday, Saudi Arabia carried out joint airstrikes with the United States against Iran-backed militias in Iraq, accusing them of attacking Saudi oil facilities on Monday. Saudi government statements appeared to portray the strikes as a limited reaction to specific attacks, rather than an entry into the wider war waged by the U.S. and Israel against Iran.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
