Iran mocks Trump’s ‘Project Freedom’ as adversaries wrestle over talks to end war

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President indicated that deal had materialised but truth was that Saudi Arabia had stopped US use of its bases

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When Donald Trump abruptly pulled the plug on “Project Freedom”, the scheme to open the strait of Hormuz, barely a day after it had been announced, he gave the impression that an opportunity for a peace deal had materialised that could not be missed.

To the surprise of nobody who has been following the US’s recent adventures in geopolitics, Trump’s spin concealed a lot of the underlying reality. It turns out that Trump suspended Project Freedom after Saudi Arabia stopped the US military from using its bases or airspace to carry out the operation, which involved giving air cover to commercial shipping sailing through the strait.

There are different versions of why this happened. NBC News, which first reported the Saudi action, suggested it was because Riyadh, and other Gulf capitals, were not informed beforehand. Elsewhere, Saudi commentary said the shutdown of US operations was only made after an Iranian attack on oil facilities in Fujairah, one of the seven emirates in the UAE – an attack that was played down by the US, which did not respond to it. That showed Riyadh, the commentators said, that Washington was ready to launch major operations in the Gulf without consulting its allies – or protecting them from the fallout.

Both versions suggest a lack of preparation underpinning Project Freedom. Two US-flagged ships took the opportunity to travel the strait and escape the Gulf, but the rest of the commercial shipping trapped by the war, estimated by the International Maritime Organization to number 2,000 vessels, stayed put.

There was no diplomatic breakthrough – no “complete and final agreement” as Trump put it – behind the sharp change in policy, just a failure of the policy, and Iran’s parliamentary speaker and chief negotiator, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, took to X to deliver a derisive one-line epitaph.

“Operation Trust Me Bro failed,” he wrote.

The US plan that Iran is reviewing has 14 points, perhaps to mirror the 14-point plan that Tehran submitted late last week and which Trump rejected. They amount to a restatement of the US negotiating position, proposing a more permanent end to the war than the ceasefire now in place and a 30-day negotiating period to open the strait and find compromises over Iran’s nuclear programme, US sanctions, and frozen Iranian assets.

While Iran’s official position is that the US proposal is pending review, one senior parliamentary official has dismissed it as an American wishlist.

The Iranians’ 14 points would require a lifting of the US blockade before talks restart and an early release of at least some of the frozen assets to provide some quick relief to its devastated economy.

Iran’s estimated $100bn in frozen assets around the world, immobilised by past sanctions, will be a feature of any deal, but Trump has balked before about agreeing their release. He and other Republican hawks have built careers on lambasting the “pallets of cash” delivered to Iran by the Obama administration as part of the 2015 nuclear deal (known as the JCPOA). They are skittish about the optics of repeating the exercise.

Trump has insisted there was “never a deadline” for Iran to respond, and a lull suits him, for now. He is due to fly to China to meet Xi Jinping in a week, and does not want to be at war when he is there.

For its part, Iran will not want to be seen as rejecting the US peace proposal out of hand, but will want to shape the terms on which talks resume, not simply go along with Trump’s framing.

Iran has little confidence in the US negotiating team: the president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner; and his friend and special envoy, Steve Witkoff; both of whom are real estate developers with limited experience or understanding of nuclear negotiations and their history.

Both Kushner and Witkoff both have extensive business interests in the Middle East and ties to Israel, and Tehran depicts them as pro-Israel provocateurs. Iranian confidence will hardly be enhanced by the addition to the US team in recent days of Nick Stewart, an analyst drawn from the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, which was founded as a pro-Israel lobbying group and which campaigned intensively against the 2015 JCPOA nuclear deal.

The Iranian regime that will eventually come to the table is considerably more hardline and – unsurprisingly – more distrustful than it was when it agreed that deal 11 years ago. The negotiators are after all survivors of the surprise US-Israeli attack on 28 February, launched in the middle of an earlier round of negotiations.

“In Iran’s case, external pressure did not fracture the system; it reinforced the position of its most hardline figures,” Danny Citrinowicz, the former head of the Iran desk in Israeli military intelligence and now a senior researcher at the Institute for National Security Studies, wrote in the journal Foreign Affairs. “The result is an Iran that is less predictable, less restrained, and probably more dangerous.”

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