Trump’s ‘dirty ceasefire’ tested as Iran hits shipping

Donald Trump extended what he calls a ceasefire with Iran. Within hours, Tehran seized merchant ships in the Strait of Hormuz, a show of force by a navy that the US president has insisted he destroyed.

The attacks on Wednesday by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ navy — a third ship was fired at and left stranded — underlined Iran’s hardline stance and refusal to submit to US pressure as mediators struggle to revive talks to end the war.

Both sides think they have the upper hand and are desperate not to be seen to be conceding to the other. The US itself earlier seized an Iranian ship as part of Trump’s blockade on the Islamic republic’s ports.

But it has left the adversaries locked in a costly battle of wills: a scrappy ceasefire that may put a lid on full-blown war without ever stopping hostilities or easing the energy crisis. Crucially, the Strait of Hormuz remains all but closed, with ships in effect requiring permission from both the Iranians and the US to pass through the strategic chokepoint.

“Trump and Tehran can only achieve a dirty ceasefire for now,” said Sanam Vakil, head of the Middle East programme at Chatham House. “If their positions don’t deteriorate further, this could allow both sides to create some breathing room to hammer out a broader deal. The risk, however, is that this becomes the new normal.”

Trump had for days been talking up the prospects of a resumption of talks and a deal to end the war. But Pakistani efforts to host a second round of negotiations in Islamabad broke down on Tuesday after Tehran refused to attend as long as the US blockade on its ports was in place.

The US president said he would extend the ceasefire, which was due to expire on Wednesday, but insisted the naval blockade would hold. He set no timeframe for the truce, other than to say until “such time as their proposal is submitted, and discussions are concluded, one way or the other”. He later claimed that Iran was “collapsing financially” and losing $500mn a day because of his naval blockade.

It all suggested that Trump was still holding out for a framework agreement that addresses his demands over Iran’s nuclear programme, reopens the strait and ends a conflict that has triggered the biggest energy crisis in decades.

But the Islamic regime, which has not commented on the ceasefire extension, fears that Trump may be stalling for time to resume the conflict. A third US aircraft carrier will be in the region by the end of April.

Tehran is also betting its pain threshold is higher than the US, despite the pounding it has taken during the war, and that it can hold the global economy hostage by keeping one of the world’s most vital waterways shut.

There was a fleeting moment five days ago when Pakistani mediators appeared to have secured a breakthrough. After Trump pressured Israel to agree to a 10-day pause to its offensive in Lebanon against Hizbollah, Iran’s main proxy, Tehran said it would allow commercial vessels to transit the strait.

Trump immediately declared that the waterway was “ready for business and full passage”, sending oil prices plummeting. He went on to claim Iran had agreed to many of his demands, including handing over its stockpile of uranium enriched close to weapons-grade levels.

This infuriated Tehran. It rejected Trump’s claims and hated being seen to capitulate to his nuclear demands, and was annoyed by his decision to continue the naval blockade.

When JD Vance prepared to depart for Islamabad as head of the US delegation at new talks, Iranian officials kept silent about whether Tehran would send negotiators.

Pakistani mediators scrambled to break the impasse, but on Tuesday evening — a day before the ceasefire was to expire — Washington confirmed that Vance would no longer be travelling.

Vali Nasr, a former US official and professor at Johns Hopkins University, said the view in Iran was that the “US is preparing for war and this is all theatre”.

“And if there’s going to be talks they want a US commitment to lift the blockade in exchange for which they might have relaxed restrictions on the strait,” Nasr said.

Trump’s boastful comments created a problem within the republic, “because it looked to their own population as though they had completely caved and that triggered debate about whether to trust the process”, he added.

Dan Shapiro, a former senior US defence official, said Trump had backed himself into a corner by not anticipating how Iran would react to the war and “misperceiving that military dominance does not by itself bring strategic victory”.

“Trump seems to think his all-caps tweets and threats of annihilation are going to get them to capitulate, but each one of those threats seems to convey his panic and his desperation, and probably stiffens the Iranians’ resolve,” said Shapiro, now a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council.

He added the odds of Trump getting a nuclear deal with Iran that was substantially better than the 2015 deal Tehran signed with the Obama administration and other world powers were now “very low”.

Trump abandoned that accord in his first term, reigniting Iran’s decades-long nuclear stand-off with the US. Tehran responded by dramatically expanding its programme and enriching uranium close to weapons-grade levels. Pressuring the regime to dismantle its nuclear infrastructure has been his prime objective of the war.

But Shapiro said the most important thing for the US now was to get the strait fully reopened “and that probably only comes if you kick the rest of this down the road”.

“We can monitor their nuclear materials and be prepared to strike again if needed. But if all we can get out of it is a very squishy deal, where the highly enriched uranium remains in the country, down-blended there, and there’s a 10 or 15 year moratorium on enrichment, we haven’t got very much,” he said. “We certainly haven’t captured the strategic gains we would have expected out of the operational successes of the military campaign.”

But in the battle of endurance, both sides are taking risks and in danger of miscalculations, analysts say.

Matthew Savill at Rusi, the London-based think-tank, said the signals were that both sides were manoeuvring for position ahead of any talks. The Iranians have some advantages because they just need the “perception of threat” to keep the strait closed.

But they could also misread the US in believing they can outlast the Trump administration and overplay their hand, he said.

“The risk for the US is that it can do phenomenal damage,” Savill said. “But if it doesn’t have a way of turning that into political success, then what it has done is really hammer the Iranians . . . but at such a cost that down the line they regret it.”

Data visualisation by Alan Smith