Trump's unreliable narration of US-Iran war

As the story of the US-Iran war is written direct to social media, Donald Trump may be the genre’s premier unreliable narrator.

Since the war began, Trump has again and again threatened Iran with fearsome consequences if Tehran doesn’t come to the table and sign a peace deal that the US president said was imminent weeks ago. And he has also repeatedly claimed that an Iran deal is “close” – without any result. (A CNN tally put the number of times he’s claimed it at 38.)

Never mind that the US has already claimed “complete victory” in the conflict and Trump has attacked reporters who have questioned the wisdom of the intervention, particularly as the strait of Hormuz remains closed to more than 20% of global oil traffic.

Even so, he continues to seek to have it both ways: both declaring Iran vanquished and painting the country’s stubbornness as the reason why he can’t sign a peace deal and end the conflict.

“The Bully of the Middle East is DEAD!!!” he wrote in a missive on Monday. “They’ve taken too long to negotiate a deal that would have been great for them, now they will have to pay the price!!!”

The US president was posting after a US Apache helicopter was downed off the coast of Oman by an Iranian drone, despite claims from both Trump and the Pentagon chief, Pete Hegseth, that Iran “[doesn’t] have anti-aircraft, they don’t have radar”.

That does not quite seem the case. Iran’s missile and drone attacks have continued against nearby US allies in Kuwait, Bahrain and Jordan. In retaliation for the downing of the Apache helicopter, the US managed to strike more than 20 targets in Iran including radar and anti-aircraft sites, according to US officials.

And on Wednesday in the Oval Office, Trump warned of a fierce response from the US but also said that a deal was within reach. “We’re gonna hit ’em again hard today … and we’ll see what happens with a deal,” he said. “We’re really close to a deal but they keep on tapping us along, they keep playing us for suckers.”

The barrage and whiplash of White House claims of imminent deals and then threats that “a whole civilization will die tonight” have kept Trump squarely where he wants to be – dominating the news cycle – but they have also increasingly eroded trust in his declarations, even in life-and-death issues concerning a war.

Other leaders appear to be playing on the credibility gap within the US administration. Trump said he planned to tell Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, not to retaliate against Iran this week, but when Israel did strike Iran, he claimed in a BBC interview that the “missiles had already gone”. He later denied that Netanyhau had defied him, adding that when he tells Netanyahu “to do something, he does it”.

Similarly, the US president has repeatedly threatened Tehran with airstrikes on its civil and energy infrastructure – a campaign that many international observers have characterised as a potential war crime – but then repeatedly reverted to diplomacy or ultimatums with two-week windows that are soon forgotten.

Then, as negotiations sputter or tensions flare up after an incident like Monday’s downing of the US helicopter, the cycle of threat, detente and deadlock ultimately repeats itself.

Fox News on Wednesday reported that Trump was once again “inching” toward the radical strikes on Iran, which would potentially devastate Iran’s economy and both military and civilian life, without necessarily reopening the strait of Hormuz or forcing the government to sue for peace.

The Trump administration is once again stuck, unable to translate its military superiority into political acquiescence, with little indication of movement on the ground in negotiations other than the president’s own volatile posts to Truth Social.

And at least rhetorically, Iran has indicated that it is in no mood for a total capitulation. “Despite its defeats on the battlefield, the US opted to test our determination,” wrote the country’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi. “Our powerful armed forces will leave no attack or threat unanswered. Leave our region if you want to be safe.”