{"id":12618,"date":"2025-06-25T04:51:12","date_gmt":"2025-06-25T04:51:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/12618\/"},"modified":"2025-06-25T04:51:12","modified_gmt":"2025-06-25T04:51:12","slug":"this-is-what-could-happen-next-after-an-israel-iran-ceasefire","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/12618\/","title":{"rendered":"This is what could happen next after an Israel-Iran ceasefire"},"content":{"rendered":"

WASHINGTON (AP) \u2014 The whipsaw chain of events<\/a> involving Iran, Israel and the United States that culminated in a surprise ceasefire has raised many questions about how the Trump administration will approach the Middle East going forward.<\/p>\n

Yet, the answer to the bottom line question \u2014 \u201cwhat\u2019s next?\u201d \u2014 remains unknowable and unpredictable. That is because President Donald Trump<\/a> has essentially sidelined the traditional U.S. national security apparatus and confined advice and decision-making to a very small group of top aides operating from the White House.<\/p>\n

While there is uncertainty about whether the ceasefire between Iran and Israel<\/a> will hold, it opens the possibility of renewed talks with Tehran over its nuclear program and reinvigorating stalled negotiations in other conflicts.<\/p>\n

\u201cNow it\u2019s time for us to sit down with the Iranians and get to a comprehensive peace agreement,\u201d special envoy Steve Witkoff said Tuesday on Fox News Channel\u2019s \u201cThe Ingraham Angle.\u201d<\/p>\n

Watching for next steps on Trump\u2019s social media<\/p>\n

Outside experts, long consulted by presidential administrations on policy, have been forced like the general public to follow Trump\u2019s social media musings and pronouncements<\/a> for insights on his thinking or the latest turn of events.<\/p>\n

Even Congress does not appear to be in the loop as top members were provided only cursory notifications of Trump\u2019s weekend decision to hit three Iranian nuclear facilities, and briefings on their impact scheduled for Tuesday<\/a> were abruptly postponed.<\/p>\n

State Department spokeswoman Tammy Bruce, whose agency has played a key role in formulating Iran policy for decades, repeatedly on Tuesday deferred questions to the White House and Trump\u2019s posts.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe secretary of state was in a dynamic with the president that is a private dynamic as that team was addressing a war and the nature of how to stop it,\u201d she told reporters. \u201cI can\u2019t speak to how that transpired or the decisions that were made.\u201d<\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s announcement Monday that Israel and Iran agreed to a ceasefire<\/a> took many in the administration by surprise \u2014 as did his post Tuesday that China is now free to import Iranian oil. <\/p>\n

It\u2019s an apparent 180-degree shift from Trump\u2019s \u201cmaximum pressure campaign\u201d on Iran since he withdrew from the 2015 Iran nuclear agreement during his first term. U.S. officials were left wondering if that meant wide-ranging sanctions aimed at cutting off Iran\u2019s energy revenue were being eased or reversed.<\/p>\n

Assessing the damage to Iran\u2019s nuclear program<\/p>\n

While the extent of the damage from 11 days of Israeli attacks and the weekend strikes by U.S. bunker-buster bombs is not yet fully known, a preliminary assessment from the Defense Intelligence Agency said the nuclear program had been set back only a few months<\/a> and was not \u201ccompletely and fully obliterated\u201d as Trump has said.<\/p>\n

According to people familiar with the report, it found that while the strikes at the Fordo, Natanz and Isfahan nuclear sites did significant damage, they were not totally destroyed.<\/p>\n

Still, most experts believe the facilities will require months or longer to repair or reconstruct if Iran chooses to try to maintain its program at previous levels. Witkoff said the strikes set back Iran\u2019s ability to enrich uranium to weapons-grade by years.<\/p>\n

Vice Admiral Brad Cooper, deputy commander of U.S. Central Command, who has been nominated to lead forces in the Middle East, told lawmakers Tuesday that Iran still possesses \u201csignificant tactical capability.\u201d He pointed to Iran\u2019s attempt to retaliate by launching missiles at a U.S. base in Qatar<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In response to a question about whether the Iranians still pose a threat to U.S. troops and Americans worldwide, Cooper replied, \u201cThey do.\u201d<\/p>\n

Trump, after announcing the ceasefire, boasted that Iran will never again have a nuclear program.<\/p>\n

However, there are serious questions about whether Iran\u2019s leadership, which has placed a high premium on maintaining its nuclear capabilities, will be willing to negotiate them away. <\/p>\n

Restarting US-Iran nuclear talks is possible<\/p>\n

Another major question is what happens with negotiations over Iran\u2019s nuclear program<\/a>. It is not entirely clear who in Iran has the authority to make a deal or even agree to reenter talks .<\/p>\n

Ray Takeyh, a former State Department official and senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, said Iranian leadership is at a moment of disarray \u2014 making it difficult to return to the table. <\/p>\n

\u201cThe country\u2019s leadership and the regime is not cohesive enough to be able to come to some sort of negotiations at this point, especially negotiations from the American perspective, whose conclusion is predetermined, namely, zero enrichment,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Karim Sadjadpour, an Iran expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, agreed, saying the biggest challenge right now is who is in charge in Tehran.\u201d <\/p>\n

\u201cIs there an Iranian negotiation team empowered to make consequential decisions?\u201d he said. \u201cThe issue is that (Trump) is dealing with an Iranian government whose longtime identity has been based on hostility toward the the United States.\u201d<\/p>\n

Witkoff said the U.S. and Iran are already in early discussions, both directly and through intermediaries, about resuming negotiations. \u201cThe conversations are promising. We\u2019re hopeful.\u201d<\/p>\n

At the U.N. on Tuesday, Iranian Ambassador Amir Saeid Iravani told the Security Council that \u201cdiplomacy and dialogue are the only path to resolving the unnecessary crisis over Iran\u2019s peaceful program.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the aftermath of the U.S. strikes, Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio both stressed that diplomacy is still Trump\u2019s preferred method for ending the conflict permanently.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe didn\u2019t blow up the diplomacy,\u201d Vance told NBC\u2019s \u201cMeet the Press\u201d on Sunday. \u201cThe diplomacy never was given a real chance by the Iranians. And our hope \u2026 is that this maybe can reset here.\u201d<\/p>\n

Rubio echoed those comments.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re prepared right now, if they call right now and say we want to meet, let\u2019s talk about this, we\u2019re prepared to do that,\u201d he said. \u201cThe president\u2019s made that clear from the very beginning: His preference is to deal with this issue diplomatically.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Israel-Iran ceasefire could affect Trump\u2019s approach to other conflicts<\/p>\n

If it holds, the ceasefire could offer insight to the Trump administration as it tries to broker peace in several other significant conflicts with ties to Iran.<\/p>\n

An end \u2014 even a temporary one \u2014 to the Iran-Israel hostilities may allow the administration to return to talks with mediators like Egypt and Qatar to seek an end to the war between Israel<\/a> and the Iranian-backed militant group Hamas.<\/p>\n

In Syria, a further shift away from now-weakened Iranian influence \u2014 pervasive during ousted leader Bashar Assad\u2019s reign \u2014 could open new doors for U.S.-Syria cooperation. Trump already has met the leader<\/a> of the new Syrian government and eased U.S. sanctions<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Similarly, tense U.S. relations with Lebanon also could benefit from a reduced Iranian role in supporting the Hezbollah militant group, which has been a force of its own \u2014 rivaling if not outperforming the Lebanese Armed Forces, particularly near the Israeli border.<\/p>\n

If an Iran-Israel ceasefire holds, it also could allow Trump the time and space to return to stalled efforts to broker a ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine. <\/p>\n

Russia and Iran have substantial economic and military cooperation, including Tehran providing Moscow with drones that the Russian military has relied on heavily in its war against Ukraine. <\/p>\n

Russia has stepped up attacks on Ukraine<\/a> in recent days as Israel attacked sites in Iran, perhaps expecting the world\u2019s attention to shift away from its three-year-old invasion. <\/p>\n

___<\/p>\n

AP writers Aamer Madhani and Eric Tucker in Washington and Edith M. Lederer at the United Nations contributed to this report.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"WASHINGTON (AP) \u2014 The whipsaw chain of events involving Iran, Israel and the United States that culminated in…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":12619,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[97,13225,13224,13229,7838,69,57,51,3464,83,3461,99,2066,13228,410,13223,3097,8132,50,80,13227,3657,13222,13226,5322,52,67,370,96,93,107],"class_list":{"0":"post-12618","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-news","8":"tag-2024-2025-mideast-wars","9":"tag-amir-saeid-iravani","10":"tag-bashar-assad","11":"tag-brad-cooper","12":"tag-diplomacy","13":"tag-donald-trump","14":"tag-general-news","15":"tag-headlines","16":"tag-international-agreements","17":"tag-iran","18":"tag-iran-government","19":"tag-israel","20":"tag-jd-vance","21":"tag-karim-sadjadpour","22":"tag-marco-rubio","23":"tag-max-irons","24":"tag-middle-east","25":"tag-military-and-defense","26":"tag-news","27":"tag-politics","28":"tag-ray-takeyh","29":"tag-russia-ukraine-war","30":"tag-scott-kingery","31":"tag-steve-witkoff","32":"tag-tammy-bruce","33":"tag-top-stories","34":"tag-united-states","35":"tag-united-states-government","36":"tag-war-and-unrest","37":"tag-washington-news","38":"tag-world-news"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":"Validation failed: Text character limit of 500 exceeded"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12618","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12618"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12618\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12619"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12618"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12618"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12618"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}