Trump again threatens to raze Iran after showing dissatisfaction with a new peace offer from Tehran
The president says the option to a pact is "go there and completely raze them once and for all"
BarcelonaIran has sent a new peace negotiation proposal to the United States through Pakistan, the official IRNA agency reported this Friday, which offered no details on the content of the proposal. "The Islamic Republic of Iran delivered the text of its latest negotiation proposal to Pakistan, intermediary in negotiations with the United States, on the afternoon of Thursday, April 30," the state media indicated.
Hours after this information became known, from the White House, about to board a plane to fly to Florida where he will spend the weekend, the President of the United States, Donald Trump, rejected the offer: "They want to reach an agreement," he told reporters at the White House. "But I am not satisfied." Trump did not specify exactly what he cannot accept from the latest document presented by Iran. Immediately after, as he has done on previous occasions, he suggested that the leaders of Iran might never end up accepting a negotiated way out of the war. "They have advanced, but I don't know if they ever will," for reasons including the "enormous disagreement" among Iranian leaders. "The leadership is very uncoordinated. There are two or three groups, maybe four, and it's a very fragmented leadership. That said, they all want to reach an agreement, but they have it all tangled up."
When the sixty-day deadline is about to be met Tehran already presented a proposal last week in Washington, through Islamabad, in which it proposed a negotiation in several phases, with the first focused on ending the war and reopening the Strait of Hormuz by both parties, and leaving the issue of Iran's nuclear program for later.
At that moment, various North American media reported that this Iranian proposal did not convince the president. The press closest to the White House indicated that the major obstacle had been the ayatollahs' intention to postpone negotiations on the Islamic Republic's nuclear program, a major obsession for Trump.
For the moment, then, despite Pakistan's diplomatic efforts, direct talks between Washington and Tehran are stalled due to the Iranian refusal to sit down and negotiate as long as the United States maintains the naval siege on its ports and ships, a measure aimed at blocking the Iranian economy.
Iran, for its part, maintains control of transit through the Strait of Hormuz, the strategic route through which 20% of the world's oil passed until the end of February, and has seen it plummet. All of this has driven up the price of crude oil, with Brent crude, the European benchmark, closing at just over $108 this Friday.
The two parties held a meeting in Islamabad on April 11 and 12 with an Iranian delegation led by Parliament Speaker Mohamed Baqer Qalibaf, and the American delegation by Vice President JD Vance, in the highest-level meeting since the triumph of the Islamic revolution in 1979. In this meeting, however, they did not reach an agreement to end the war that the United States and Israel launched against Iran on February 28 and which has been stalled since the April 8 ceasefire.
An unpopular war
Despite Trump's belligerent words, a poll published this Friday by The Washington Post/ABC News/Ipsos shows citizen weariness with the use of US military force against Iran: 61% of Americans consider it was a mistake to go with Israel to bomb the country. This is a similar figure to that registered regarding the Iraq war in 2006 (59%) and also comparable to the rejection that the Vietnam War already aroused in 1971. The disagreement is especially wide among Democrats (nearly 90%) and independents (71%), while among Republicans only 19% see it as a mistake.
As for the next steps, public opinion is very divided: 48% prefer to make peace with Tehran even if the agreement is less favorable to the US, while 46% opt for pressuring Iran to obtain a better deal, even if this implies resuming military action. The poll also reflects growing economic concern. 23% of citizens say they are financially worse off, up from 17% in February. Furthermore, 52% say they just barely make ends meet, and only 24% claim to be progressing economically.
The rise in gasoline prices also weighs on households: 44% say they are driving less, 42% have cut household expenses, and 34% have changed travel or vacation plans. Half of Americans believe that the price of fuel will worsen further in the coming year.