High-stakes poker game: as the war in Iran entered its fourth week, Donald Trump surprised everyone on Monday, March 23, starting with Benyamin Netanyahu, by announcing ongoing negotiations with a senior Iranian leader – a claim Tehran denies – that he carefully did not name. Two days later, the American president gave Iran forty-eight hours to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, under threat of “striking and obliterating their energy centers.” He now grants them an additional five days.
How to understand this reversal? According to the Israeli newspaper Ha’Aretz, this deadline allows Trump to “buy time to study his options, assess the possibility of an agreement and complete the deployment of US marines and ships in the region in case of failed talks.” Especially, as explained by the Financial Times, this “apparent change of position” comes as the White House faces “increasing pressure to find a resolution to the conflict, due to the spike in oil prices and the somewhat lukewarm support of the American public opinion.”
After promising the worst, Donald Trump changes course once again. Above all, he increasingly gives the impression of navigating blindly. Under these conditions, it is uncertain whether the announcement of negotiations alone will be enough to avoid the escalation that the entire world fears today. That’s what Andreas Krieg explains well on the Dawn Mena site: “Twenty years have passed [since the Iraq war], and here are the United States of 2026 once again embroiled in a war in the Middle East that they neither master nor understand. Midway between magical thinking and neoconservative intervention dogmatism, the strategists of Tel Aviv and Washington are realizing that they have indeed engaged in a war against a militia with a state.”
Our coverage of the war in Iran. Courrier international
And this changes everything, writes this Middle East specialist. Americans like Israelis have underestimated the resistance capacity of the Revolutionary Guards, “who have been preparing for nearly fifty years for a war of attrition against a technologically superior enemy,” and have built “a network of networks designed to resist indefinitely in this war of attrition.” Especially since the decentralized organization of the Pasdaran, with “semi-autonomous units,” makes their strategy harder to decipher.
/2026/03/25/075-nikoubazl-parliame260112-npeu9-69c46360dd061122413769.jpg "Middle East War: Iran rejects American plan, Israel expands its buffer zone in Lebanon, Hezbol")
