{"id":199682,"date":"2026-07-10T09:34:08","date_gmt":"2026-07-10T09:34:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/199682\/"},"modified":"2026-07-10T09:34:08","modified_gmt":"2026-07-10T09:34:08","slug":"trumps-welcome-turn-on-tehran","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/199682\/","title":{"rendered":"Trump\u2019s welcome turn on Tehran"},"content":{"rendered":"

President Donald Trump<\/a> has declared his ceasefire with Iran<\/a> \u201cover\u201d and ordered new strikes on the terrorist regime there. The reversal is welcome, though it comes only after weeks of Tehran exploiting a flawed deal<\/a> that should not have been trusted in the first place.<\/p>\n

Speaking at the NATO summit in Turkey<\/a> on July 8, Trump called Iran\u2019s leaders \u201clying scum.\u201d He warned that Iran was led by \u201cvicious, violent people, and if they had a nuclear weapon, they\u2019d use it.\u201d<\/p>\n

The previous night, the U.S. launched new offensive strikes, hitting more than 80 military and strategic targets with precision munitions \u201cas an immediate response to Iran\u2019s latest attacks on commercial vessels transiting the Strait of Hormuz,\u201d according to a statement from U.S. Central Command.<\/p>\n

Iran responded by attacking American bases in the Gulf. The speaker of Iran\u2019s Parliament, Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf, a former Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps commander, suggested that the ceasefire had formally ended and declared, \u201cWe don\u2019t fold.\u201d<\/p>\n

Trump warned that more strikes were on the way and vowed to hit Iran \u201chard.\u201d Not for the first time, the president threatened to attack \u201cat the highest level,\u201d which he described as including bridges and electric plants.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf we have to, we\u2019ll take them out,\u201d Trump told reporters at the NATO conference before threatening to \u201ctake over Kharg Island,\u201d Iran\u2019s main oil processing facility.<\/p>\n

The strikes and the rhetoric are a sharp reversal of policy.<\/p>\n

Just 22 days earlier, Trump had described Iran\u2019s leaders as \u201cvery rational people\u201d who were \u201cnot radicalized\u201d and \u201cnice to deal with.\u201d<\/p>\n

At the time, Vice President JD Vance<\/a> called the deal a \u201cwin-win\u201d for the U.S. and suggested that the deal was already \u201cbearing fruit\u201d by letting oil move through the Strait of Hormuz. Vance argued that the deal was purely about \u201crewarding good conduct and punishing bad conduct.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIf the Iranians don\u2019t change their behavior, their military and their nuclear program is still destroyed,\u201d Vance said. \u201cIf they do change their behavior, then they are going to have a transformative relationship with the Middle East.\u201d<\/p>\n

The agreement lifted pressure on Tehran in exchange for promises that the regime had no intention and little incentive to keep.<\/p>\n

Counting on the Islamic Republic to change its behavior was always a bad bet. Anti-Americanism and antisemitism are not bargaining positions for Tehran, but core tenets of the regime\u2019s ideology.<\/p>\n

Since its bloody birth in 1979, the regime has chanted \u201cDeath to America.\u201d Its actions have shown that it means what it says.<\/p>\n

For nearly half a century, the Islamic Republic has kidnapped, tortured, and murdered Americans while its proxies have sown death and destruction throughout the world.<\/p>\n

Iran, as Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in February, is the \u201csingle greatest source of instability in the Middle East.\u201d<\/p>\n

Operation Epic Fury targeted and killed the upper echelons of Iran\u2019s political and military leadership and severely degraded its defense industrial base. The joint U.S.-Israeli military campaign deeply damaged Iran\u2019s ability to project power, but it did not eliminate the regime\u2019s will to survive.<\/p>\n

By seizing and holding the Strait of Hormuz, Iran forced the U.S. to negotiate. In his defense of the deal, Trump said, \u201cThe alternative to this deal was a global recession.\u201d Without the deal, he said, \u201cthe Strait of Hormuz would never have opened.\u201d<\/p>\n

But the deal counted on Iran to change its behavior and effectively kept it in charge of the strait. By front-loading sanctions relief in the form of oil waivers, the U.S. reduced its leverage right out of the gate.<\/p>\n

The Trump administration\u2019s decision to agree to an early ceasefire on April 7, a mere 38 days after the war started, has proven to be a mistake. So was the decision to keep extending the ceasefire while overlooking repeated Iranian violations.<\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s attempts to cajole Iran into behaving by repeatedly threatening, and then failing, to launch attacks on the country\u2019s critical infrastructure similarly eroded America\u2019s deterrence.<\/p>\n

Iran has taken the measure of American resolve and found it wanting.<\/p>\n

MAMDANI\u2019S SOCIALIST BUDGETING LIES<\/a><\/p>\n

As a result, the Trump administration will now have to work that much harder to regain the initiative and show Tehran that American threats carry weight. The U.S. cannot afford any more empty warnings about \u201cbridges and tunnels,\u201d nor can it pretend that Iran will negotiate in good faith.<\/p>\n

The end of the ill-fated deal is both welcome and inevitable. But the hard road ahead is the price of having surrendered the initiative to a regime that never intended to change.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"President Donald Trump has declared his ceasefire with Iran \u201cover\u201d and ordered new strikes on the terrorist regime…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":199683,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[4],"tags":[38,9014,34,1096,101,69,36],"class_list":["post-199682","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tehran","tag-donald-trump","tag-editorials","tag-iran","tag-jd-vance","tag-strait-of-hormuz","tag-tehran","tag-war"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@iran\/116895000993276949","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/199682","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=199682"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/199682\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/199683"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=199682"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=199682"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=199682"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}