“The Peace President” Gets Belligerent with Iran and the Pope
On Saturday evening, President Donald Trump took his two daughters, Tiffany and Ivanka, and his son Donald, Jr., to watch a series of Ultimate Fighting Championship bouts in Miami. In one of the best White House pool reports of the year, Katie Rogers, of the Times, described the President sitting ringside as two heavyweight fighters “batter and bloody each other.” The crowd, she went on, “is chanting ‘this is awesome’ as blood or saliva sprays with each punch.” In an interlude between fights, the theme song from Mortal Kombat played. Trump, to celebrate his eightieth birthday, in June, is hosting another major U.F.C. event on the South Lawn of the White House. A five-thousand-seat arena will be constructed for the occasion. Trump savors fights, whether in the ring or on the world stage.
For all his now-laughable lust for a Nobel Peace Prize, Trump is leaving the actual diplomacy to others. As he watched the fights in Miami, his Vice-President, J. D. Vance, was in Islamabad, Pakistan, meeting with a high-powered Iranian delegation to try to negotiate an end to a war that has killed thousands, cost billions, triggered violence across the already volatile Middle East, crippled global energy supply lines, jacked up natural-gas and oil prices everywhere, and undermined the long-standing U.S. alliance with Europe. In just six weeks, the conflict has produced once-in-a-generation turbulence around the world. Vance, who was wary of going to war with Iran in the first place, got stuck navigating an end to it. Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State and national-security adviser, was in Miami, at the U.F.C. event, with Trump.
After twenty-one hours, the negotiations ended without resolution. The talks had been civil, both sides reported. Vance shook hands with Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the powerful speaker of parliament and a former Revolutionary Guard commander, although there were no photo ops. It was the highest-level contact between Iran and the United States since the Islamic Revolution, in 1979. “We’ve made it very clear what our redlines are,” Vance said at a brief post-talks press conference. “And they’ve chosen not to accept our terms.” The U.S. needs “an affirmative commitment” that Iran will cease any efforts to develop a nuclear weapon, Vance said. He did not mention other flash points—including ballistic-missile stockpiles, protesters and regime change, or Iran’s support of Hezbollah and other proxies—that have been cited by Trump in the past. The Vice-President described the U.S. position as the “final and best” offer. “We’ll see if the Iranians accept it.”
As Vance made the long slog back to Washington, Trump announced, late on Sunday morning, that the U.S. would immediately “begin the process of BLOCKADING any and all Ships trying to enter, or leave, the Strait of Hormuz.” He added, “Any Iranian who fires at us, or at peaceful vessels, will be BLOWN TO HELL!”
That night, Trump was back online, this time launching a tirade against the first American Pope, Leo XIV. Earlier in the week, the President had claimed that God supports the U.S. and Israel in their war against Iran. At a prayer vigil at St. Peter’s Basilica on Saturday, the Pope warned about the “delusion of omnipotence that surrounds us and is becoming increasingly unpredictable and aggressive.” He did not mention Trump by name, but it wasn’t hard to infer. “Enough of the idolatry of self and money!” Leo said. “Enough of the display of power! Enough of war!” Among those in attendance at the service was the Archbishop of Tehran.
En route back to Washington from Florida, Trump issued a blistering attack on the Pontiff on Truth Social. Leo was “terrible” on foreign policy for not supporting the U.S. military operation in Venezuela, in January, or the war in Iran, he said. “I don’t want a Pope who criticizes the President of the United States because I’m doing exactly what I was elected, IN A LANDSLIDE, to do.” Leo was only elected to the papacy, Trump charged, because the Church thought that an American would know how to deal with Trump. “If I wasn’t in the White House, Leo wouldn’t be in the Vatican,” he said. The Pope should “get his act together” and “stop catering to the Radical Left,” the post went on. “It’s hurting him very badly and, more importantly, it’s hurting the Catholic Church!” Later, Trump posted an A.I. image of what appeared to be himself as Jesus Christ.
On Monday, Leo, who was starting a four-nation tour of Africa, said that he had no fear of the Trump Administration. When pressed by reporters on his plane about Trump’s remarks on Truth Social, he replied, “It’s ironic—the name of the site itself. Say no more.”
As the shaky ceasefire enters its second week, the U.S. blockade, now under way, changes the dynamics in the Persian Gulf. Since the war began, Iran has choked off most maritime traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, letting only some “friendly” ships pass through. Now the U.S. will block all ships bound for or coming from Iran or its coastal areas.
The strategic calculus, for both countries, is about holding out longer than the other. “The United States and Iran are drifting into a familiar and dangerous pattern: a war of attrition where each side believes it can impose more pain than it can absorb,” Danny Citrinowicz, the former head of Iran analysis in Israeli military intelligence who is now at the Institute for National Security Studies, warned on Monday. “This is a recipe not for resolution, but for escalation.” He also wrote, “Closing the Strait of Hormuz will not force Iran into submission, at least not from Tehran’s perspective. What did not work after five weeks of sustained aerial pressure is unlikely to succeed through maritime pressure alone.”
The markets agreed. On Monday, the price of oil quickly surged above a hundred dollars a barrel. In the U.S., the cost of gas had already topped four dollars a gallon. That, along with continued volatility in the stock market, has led many Republicans to fear consequences in the midterm elections in November. An English-language post on X, which purports to be from Ghalibaf, responded to Trump’s blockade announcement with a quip, “Enjoy the current pump figures. With the so-called ‘blockade’, Soon you’ll be nostalgic for $4–$5 gas.” Ghalibaf is emerging as the most powerful politician in Iran after the death of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei—and the reported injuries to his son Mojtaba, the new Supreme Leader—in U.S. and Israeli air strikes on the first day of the war.
Iran, whose infrastructure has been hard hit by more than thirteen thousand U.S. air strikes and more than ten thousand Israeli strikes, may suffer huge financial losses, too. A blockade could cost the nation more than four hundred million dollars a day in lost trade, or some thirteen billion dollars a month, according to Miad Maleki, an Iranian American sanctions expert formerly at the Treasury Department and now at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. The Iranian rial is already verging on collapse. On the eve of the talks in Pakistan, it traded at 1.5 million to the dollar. “The blockade makes continued resistance economically impossible,” Maleki said.
An end to the six-week war—and a half century of enmity—was never going to be resolved in a single day. The nuclear deal brokered by the Obama Administration, in 2015, which Trump abandoned in 2018, took two years of meticulous negotiations. After the failed talks this past weekend, both sides issued ultimatums—and indications that diplomacy was not over. Ghalibaf claimed, on social media, that he had offered some “forward-looking” initiatives. The Iranian foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, said that the two countries were “just minutes” away from an agreement, which focussed heavily on Iran’s nuclear program and, in turn, the release of Iranian frozen assets when “we encountered maximalism, shifting goalposts and blockade.” He noted, “Good will begets good will. Enmity begets enmity.” And rhetoric, it could be said, begets more rhetoric.
At the heart of every crisis between Washington and Tehran since 1979 has been the conundrum of how these two former allies, which aided each other throughout the Cold War, can ever rebuild that trust. For decades, both countries have inflated threats posed by the other, which has hardened their resolve against finding common ground, Robert Malley, a former White House official who negotiated with Iran for the 2015 nuclear deal, and who is now a senior fellow at Yale’s Jackson School, told me. “The old conundrum has now been compounded by the failure of the Trump Administration to establish the minimum level of trust that any deal requires.”
Pakistan—and Turkey and Egypt—is scrambling to organize another round of U.S.-Iran talks before the ceasefire runs out. In the meantime, close American allies are showing no interest in endorsing Trump’s blockade. The British Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, told the BBC that his government would not help cordon off Iran. “It is, in my view, vital that we get the Strait open and fully open, and that’s where we’ve put all of our efforts,” he said. France is trying to mobilize dozens of countries on a “defensive mission, distinct from the belligerents,” President Emmanuel Macron said. In a televised interview, Margarita Robles, the Spanish defense minister, said that the blockade “makes no sense.”
On Sunday, Trump predicted that Iran would return to the table and cede on every issue. “I don’t care if they come back or not,” he told reporters after returning from the U.F.C. event in Miami. “If they don’t come back, I’m fine.” And then the war just goes on. ♦