BBC: <\/p>\n\n\n\n
In the end, cooler heads prevailed \u2013 at least for now.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At 18:32 Washington time, President Donald Trump posted on his social media website that the US and Iran were “very far along” with a “definitive” peace agreement and that he had agreed to a two-week ceasefire to allow negotiations to proceed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It wasn’t exactly the last minute, but with Trump’s looming 20:00 EDT (00:00 GMT on Wednesday) deadline to reach a deal or the US would launch massive strikes against Iranian energy and transportation infrastructure, it came pretty close.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
All of this is contingent on Iran also suspending hostilities and fully opening the Strait of Hormuz to commercial shipping traffic, which the regime says it will do, while insisting it still exerts “dominion” over the waterway.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The deal allowed Trump to extricate himself from what was shaping up to be a treacherous choice \u2013 either escalating with his promise that a “whole civilisation will die tonight” or backing down and undermining his credibility. The US president may have only bought himself a temporary reprieve, however.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The US and Iranians now will engage in negotiations over the next two weeks, buying some time to try to reach a permanent settlement. It is likely to be a bumpy ride, but in after-hours trading, the price of a barrel of oil dropped below the $100 mark for the first time in days and US stock futures soared. There appears to be a sense of optimism that the worst is over.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Even this kind of progress was far from certain as recently as Tuesday morning, however, when Trump threatened the death of Iranian civilisation, “never to be brought back again”.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Whether such a jaw-dropping threat from an American president pressured Iran to agree to the kind of ceasefire they had previously rejected is uncertain. What is clear is that Trump’s astounding, inflammatory declaration \u2013 just two days after a similar obscenity-laced Truth Social demand \u2013 is unlike anything a modern US president has ever levelled or hinted at.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And even if the two-week ceasefire does result in a permanent peace, the Iran war \u2013 and Trump’s recent words \u2013 may have fundamentally altered the way the rest of the world views the US.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
BBC: In the end, cooler heads prevailed \u2013 at least for now. At 18:32 Washington time, President Donald Trump posted on his social media website that the US and Iran were “very far along” with a “definitive” peace agreement and that he had agreed to a two-week ceasefire to allow negotiations to proceed. It wasn’t exactly the last minute, but with Trump’s looming 20:00 EDT (00:00 GMT on Wednesday) deadline to reach a deal or the US would launch massive strikes against Iranian energy and transportation infrastructure, it came pretty close. All of this is contingent on Iran also suspending… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":56317,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-56316","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news-in-english"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gyalchisarshog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56316","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gyalchisarshog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gyalchisarshog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gyalchisarshog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gyalchisarshog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=56316"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/gyalchisarshog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56316\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":56318,"href":"https:\/\/gyalchisarshog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56316\/revisions\/56318"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gyalchisarshog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/56317"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gyalchisarshog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=56316"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gyalchisarshog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=56316"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gyalchisarshog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=56316"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}