US and Iran should do a deal

It's time for Washington and Tehran to stop threatening each other with military and economic action. Everyone in the world is fed up with the bickering and warnings and blackmail. It's all about ego and power abd status and money. Enough! Negotiators should get together and talk talk talk until a deal is done. The way things are going, the military bit of the war is going to start all over again and will make a deal that much more difficult. There is stillhuge US firepower in the region and Donald Trump might just have another bash but we know for sure that Iran will respond in kind by attacking US bases in the region and targeting energy plants in the Gulf. All pointless destruction for no reason other than to prove to Trump that the new regime in Tehran is not going to back down. Basically, the war was avoidable. There was a kind of deal on the table but Trump ignored it. Now he is stuck in an unholy mess and talking of an economic D-Day against Iran. The poor Iranian people, none of whom want this war to continue ruining their lives, will suffer even more. But they have leaders, both clerical and military, who don't care a fig for their personal suffering. All they want is to survive as a regime and mastermind hatred towards the US and the West. It really is time for all this hatred and revenge to be brought to a close. But I fear the presence of Trump in the White House and the bullies of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in Tehran are going to make a deal impossible. This is a catastrophe for the world.

Prince Harry and Prince William are like non-brothers

Harry and Meghan are hoping that their return to Britain to live and educate their children will bring them back into the royal family fold. But there is one huge obstacle in the way. Harry apparently hasn't spoken to his brother, William, for years. William is so angry with his brother for breaching every royal protocol going that he has cut himself off from his exiled sibling. Once Harry is back, will William make any effort to reunite with his brother or will he cold-shoulder him and Meghan for ever? King Charles will probably try to intervene between his two sons to stop this huge divide, but the Prince of Wales is his own man and he might fight against his father's efforts. Also, Katherine and Meghan cannot endure each other, judging by what has happened in the past between the two sisters-in-law. Meghan and Kate are totally different human beings and I think it's fair to say that while Kate is loved by the public, Meghan is not. This is going to make life very difficult for both Harry and Meghan when they set up home in the countryside outside London, probably near where Charles has his beloved home in Gloucestershire. Could they even be sort of neighbours? But even if their change in geography makes it possible for the King to get to know his two grandchildren - the son and daughter of Harry and Meghan - it looks highly unlikely that Prince William and Kate will be making trips to the H and M new home for fun get-togethers. I fear it's all too late. There's too much animosity between the two brothers.

Prince Harry has to pay his share of legal damages

The troubles for Prince Harry just keep on coming. Having lost his case against Associated Newspapers, publishers of the Daily Mail, failing to impress the judge that the newspaper had used criminal and devious ways to breach his private life and that of his family, he now has to pay his share of more than £9 million in legal costs. Harry is a wealthy man but this will be a huge blow to his finances, just when he is in the process of buying or renting a mansion somewhere in the countryside back in England while apparently continuing to pay for his and Meghan's posh estate in California and their holiday home in Portugal. Harry was left a lot of money by his mother, Princess Diana, and by his grandmother, Queen Elizabeth, so his bank balance is not exactly empty. Nevertheless, with no regular income from employment, apart from Meghan's housewifery television programmes, things could get a little tight for the couple. Perhaps he hopes that by moving to England, King Charles will give him a bob or two to help him along. I somehow doubt it.

Harry and Meghan are coming home

Most newspapers in the UK today splashed on the most dramatic, extraordinary story of all time: Prince Harry and his wife, the Duchess of Sussex, are to leave their multi-million-dollar home in California and return to the UK to live with their two children. TV presenters were aghast with the news which broke last night. The papers are full of analysis. It's huge. Where will they live, will they get cosy with the King and Camilla, will they actually talk to the Prince of Wales and the lovely Katherine? It's mindboggling, except that it's not, of course. But it certainly shocked all the royal correspondents. This is the couple who used to be a Royal Couple who left Britain to live in California and drop all idea of being working members of the royal family. Now, they want to come home and live a life like everyone else. For this reason, I feel sorry for them because as soon as it is discovered where they are living there is going to be a mad stampede to follow their every move. Life will not be normal, like it was in California where the local people, used to celebrities, largely left them alone to get on with their Netflix lives. Back here, it's going to be drama every day, particularly for Meghan who has made it clear she wants to be left alone while at the same time enjoy as nuch publicity as possible. It's a contradiction that doesn't really work, not here anyway. I wish them luck, especially their children at school and I hope for their sake they are not "doorstepped" wherever they go, day and night. But the likelihood is that even now every photographic agency is planning ahead for the first big image scoop. Good luck, Harry and Meghan. I mean it.

Trump's threat to bomb Oman is bonkers

Bombing Iran hasn't got the result he wanted, so threatening to bomb Oman, an ally of the United States and, incidentally, a centuries-old partner with Britain, particularly to do with military, intelligence and security issues, would be madness. In fact, bonkers. Donald Trump can't have meant it, he just says these things without thinking and then starts to row back when questioned by reporters. He is angry because it looks like Oman and Iran will do a deal together which will allow/enable Oman on the south side of the Strait of Hormuz to take charge of shipping passing through their designated channel, while Iran on the north side will administrate the other channel. Whether it will involve tolls or service charges or some other clever financial penalty, is not yet clear. But Trump doesn't like it and posted that he would bomb Oman if it dared to do such a deal with Iran. Oman is a wonderful country with very friendly and very pro-British people, excellent hospitals, largely thanks to British doctors, and a famous beach where turtles come every year to lay their eggs. So, please, Mr Trump, no bombing. The questions is, will this threat change the relationship Oman has with the West? Will it do a deal with Iran under pressure from Tehran? What will Trump actually do if this deal is signed without US approval? The reality is, there is very little Trump can do to stop this Strait of Hormuz deal from going ahead. He'll rave and complain but Tehran is basically getting what it wants, at least as far as the strait is concerned. Bombing Oman is not an option!

Putin warns Britain

The British government, both under Conservatives and Labour, has been one of the most stalwart of supporters of Ukraine and its leader President Zelensky. Zelensky has been to 10 Downing Street more than any other leader for the last four years. The key difference today is that there seem to be no red lines as far as the UK is concerned about British-supplied weapons being used by Ukrainian against targets inside Russia. Everything supplied, from drones to cruise missiles, are now being launched against Russia, and London seems to be happy about it. Putin has noticed and he keeps up with everything that the UK does for Ukraine and against Russia, and he has warned of consequences. Two UK companies are known to be supplying Ukraine with medium-range drones which have been used against targets inside Russia. What is Putin planning to do? Well, he is already doing it, he is sending warships to frolic around in the English channel, and he is sending submarines to map all the super-sensitive cables running under the Channel, and his cyber-warfare specialist teams are attacking every aspect of British life every day. But could he do more? In other words, might he actually fire something at a target in the UK? This, of course, would be viewed as a direct aggressive move and could lead to an outright war between Russia and the UK (and thus Nato). Putin is far more likely to be somewhat more cunning than that. Cyber attacks could proliferate. When Putin is angry he tends to lash out. We will all have to be on our guard.

Jared Kushner, Trump's everywhere envoy

Jared Kushner never seems to stop. Today he is in Jerusalem seeing Benjamin Netanyahu, yesterday he was in Egypt talking to Hamas leader, Khalil al-Hayya and to the Egyptian President al-Sisi. The question is, how good an envoy is he? Is he a tough talker and negotiator or is he just a message carrier for his father-in-law? By now, after two years of being a Trump special envoy for everywhere, he must have acquired negotiating skills but will he persuade Netanyahu, for example, to row back on his rejection of Trump's 20-point peace plan for Gaza or will he come away as frustrated as Trump has become with the Israeli leader? Netanyahu has a huge amount at stake. He is due to stand for reelection in October and he dare not do or say anything which could look as if he is backing down vis a vis Hamas. He wants Hamas to totally disarm before he orders any Israeli troop withdrawals. That's presumably what he will tell Kushner. But what Trump wants to hear is that Israel will withdraw from Gaza at the same time as Hamas starts handing over its weapons. In other words, choreography. So far, Netanyahu says NO to that. Let's see whether Kushner has the balls and clout to get Netanyahu to show more of a compromise. It seems unlikely.

Has Trump lost his global clout?

Like the bee or butterfly flapping its wings can have an effect on the world's environment, so the words of Donald Trump used to shake every capital on the planet. But is that still the case? Does everyone jump when Trump comes out with one of his bold statements, like when he threatened to destroy Iran's civilisation? He still has the power to shock and surprise, but after so many U-turns and changes of mind, I would say the Trump Effect has now dwindled. Is Iran terrified at the thought of Trump reordering military strikes? I somehow doubt it. The Tehran regime has learned to treat some of his warnings and threats with a pinch of salt or a shrug of the shoulders. Does Israel's prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, jump to attention every time Trump barks at him? Not any more. Netanyahu rejected Trump's peace plan for Gaza because it didn't say that Hamas had to totally disarm BEFORE Israel start to withdraw its troops from the territory. Does Europe quiver at the thought of a Trump phone call, demanding this or that? No longer, I suspect. This must mean that for his final two years in Office, Trump is going to struggle to get his own way. This will make him increasingly frustrated which is probably not a good thpught.

Why Trump is on Iran's hitlist

The assassination of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on February 28 has placed President Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, on a forever revenge hit list carried by Iran’s world network of militant Shia activists, a former Mossad official has told The Times. It was this revenge motivation which persuaded the US Secret Service to orchestrate the elaborate subterfuge which led to Trump being evacuated from Air Force One through a catering container truck to another plane at Ankara international airport for his flight home, following the end of the Nato summit in the Turkish capital on July 8. Among the mass of intelligence pouring in from all quarters over recent months, it is believed an intercepted conversation or directive from Tehran may have made reference to the option of using a man-portable missile launcher close to the airport when Trump was due to take off on Air Force One. There was a suspected sighting of such a weapon system on that day, according to the New York Times. “The Americans are looking at an enormous amount of information, and if there’s intelligence that suggests somebody, whether the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps [IRGC] or the Iranian intelligence service or a terrorist group is seeking revenge on Trump for the assassination of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, then it has to be taken seriously,” Rami Igra, former Mossad official, said. “Ali Khamenei was a religious leader, the most important personality in the Shia world. There are 250 million people in this world who are Shia Muslim. So there is a huge religious incentive for seeking revenge for the death of their leader,” he said. “It’s most likely that it ws a technological source, rather than a human source, which provided the intelligence. Technological sources are hardcore evidence which would have come from an interception of a conversation or a directive about where someone should be and at what place and time,” said Igra who was head of Mossad’s hostage and missing-in-action (MIA) department. “The US Secret Service never takes chances. They’re not allowed to take chances. Their job is to imagine the worst all the time. Israel always passes on the intelligence it gets, even to unfriendly nations, if it will save peoples’ lives,” he said. He said Iran had a history of carrying out assassinations. “But the only assassination involving the Iranian intelligence service specifically was the attack on the Mykonos restaurant in Berlin against anti-Iranian activists in the 1990s [on September 17, 1992, four exiled Kurdish-Iranian individuals were killed. A German court ruled that top leaders of the Iranian government were involved].” “On the whole, the Iranian intelligence service is not in the business of assassinations. Its speciality is espionage. Israel’s Shin Bet counter-espionage organisation has picked up 30 Israeli spies, recruited by the Iranian intelligence service,” Igra said. Iran has two overlapping intelligence services, the Ministry of Intelligence (MOI), and the IRGC’s own organisation, both of which come under the aegis of the supreme leader. In addition, there is the IRGC’s Quds Force, the overseas operations branch which carries out intelligence-gathering, sabotage and support for Iran’s proxy militia forces throughout the Middle East. Major-General Qasem Soleimani was the head of the Quds Force when he was assassinated by a US armed drone outside Baghdad airport on January 3, 2020. he IRGC intelligence branch has been specially active in recent years, kidnapping Iranian dissidents and attempted abductions of Israeli businessmen. Both the MOI and IRGC are known to be active in Turkey and the United Arab Emirates. The US Justice Department revealed that the IRGC was behind an assassination attempt against Trump when he was on the presidential campaign trail in 2024. “It’s no secret that the Iranians have wanted to assassinate Trump and other figures from this first term like Mike Pompeo [then secretary of state], John Bolton [national security adviser], and Brian Hook [special representative for Iran] who were involved in the drone strike that killed Soleimani in 2020,” a former senior US diplomatic official said. “This desire for revenge has been quickened by the Israeli pager assassination plot that decapitated Hezbollah [in 2024], strikes against IRGC figures in Syria before the fall of [President Bashar al-] Assad and the assassination of Ismail Haniyeh of Hamas in Tehran in 2024, not to mention the decapitation strikes that began the current war with Iran, including the killing of the supreme leader, and many senior leaders of the security elements,” the former official said. “Iran has not had much success, so far, with assassinating western senior leaders, as opposed to regime opponents, but they have demonstrated their reach by going after soft targets like the Jewish community centre in Buenos Aires [which killed 85 people in 1994] and [the US air base barracks at] Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia in 1996 [when a truck bomb killed 19 American airmen].” “The fact that they have, so far, failed to take out western leaders doesn't mean they will stop trying or that at some point they might not succeed.” The now-confirmed switch in planes at Ankara via the catering truck was not the first time that the US Secret Service has had to use deception to protect the life of the president. President Bill Clinton flew secretly to India and Pakistan in 2000 when a crisis was building over Kashmir between the two nuclear powers. He, too, switched from Air Force One to an unmarked aircraft. Both President George W Bush and President Barack Obama, used decoys and deception to visit, respectively, Baghdad in 2003 eight months after the start of the Iraq war, and Afghanistan to meet US troops in 2010.

Europe having to get used to extreme heat

This is the future and it doesn't look or feel good. Temperatures heading for 40C across the continent and in the United Kingdom, a summer of hot, hot, steamy weather and, in the UK at least, no air conditioning in homes. Outside, there is no wind, just oppressive hotness. This is not the future any of us wants but as the politicians throughout Europe and the rest of the world have failed, failed, failed to do anything serious about climate change, it is now hitting us very severely and there is very little we simple folk can do about it. The terrifying fact is that even if world leaders, including and especially Donald Trump and Xi Zinping, suddenly realise they have to do something, it's all too late. Temperatures have risen this year and will do so again next year and the following year. Green grass will vanish, trees will die, people will die, jobs will go, the world will creak and groan. and yet, still, the wars we now have will carry on as normal. What a future for our children and grandchildren.

Secret Service caters for Donald Trump

Donald Trump is a big guy, so being shuffled into a catering container for his switch to another plane for a getaway from Ankara the other week must have seemed somewhat undignified. But he was under orders from the Secret Service. They wanted him to leave the Nato summit in Ankara by a method that at all costs evaded the possible threat of an Iranian missile hitting his normal plane, Air Force One. Of course it's the responsibility of the president's Secret Service detail to decide what's best for him, but it was certainly unusual for the president of the United States to be exited by subterfuge from a Nato country to return home. But this is the world we live in, or to be more precise, this is the world western leaders have to face when there are malign states intent on targeting them. It is true, of course, that Iran's own leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was killed on the first day of the US/Israel war which began on February 28th, and targeting Trump in revenge is something which the US intelligence services have been aware of since that decapitation strike. It's another reason why any peace deal between the US and Iran is highly unlikely while Trump is in the White House. Trump's "catering" experience at Ankara airpoprt will go down in history as one of the more quixotic evacuation procedures used to keep the president safe.

Is Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei in charge after all?

Despite facial disfigurements and other injuries to his body and his hideaway never-seen existence, Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei who took over as Iran's supreme leader when his father was killed on the first day of the US/Israel war with Iran, seems actually to be in charge and making decisions which others are obeying. He seems to have taken the hardest-possible line on doing any sort of deal with the US and appears determined to put his stamp on the future of Iran. While the military in the shape of the commanders of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, are the visible leaders of the country, the disabled supreme leader is still issuing orders. How it is being done is difficult to guage but clearly the courier system he is suspected of using from his command bunker is working effectively. Mojtaba, I am sure, has one driving motivation for taking the toughest line with the US. He blames Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, for the assassination of his father, the late Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. He no doubt wants revenge and the best way, I giess, is for him to put so much pressure on Trump by hanging on to the Strait of Hormuz, that the US will just give up. Whatever happens in the next few weeks, Iran's control of the strait is not going to be conceded in any future deal, if there is ever a deal. Mojtaba may have vanished into his bunker somewhere, but he is alive and dictating the terms for what he will see as Trump's surrender.

Will Venezuela be Trump's only triumph?

The way things are going wrong for Trump in Iran, Gaza and Ukraine, it may turn out that when he leaves office in January 2029 he will have only one foreign success story to his name and for his legacy. Mind you, even the Venezuela venture hasn't exactly worked out well for the people. American Delta Force commandos swept in by heliopter in the dead of night and captured the dreadful President Nicolas Maduro and his wife in their pyjamas and took them back to the US for trial on drugs charges. But has that meant a transformation for the Venezuelan people, with oil money back in the treasury coffers to be spent on housing and social welfare and better living standards? Definitely not. And quite what the arrangement now is between Washington and Caracas over how the country is to be run remains somewhat cloudy. Anyway, the whizzo military operation to seize Maduro was without question a coup for Trump. But that's all he has to boast about. Everything else has gone wrong. Gaza is still in a mess with Israel and Hamas locked in anger and retribution, Iran is a hopeless case with no end in sight to an intractable impasse over the Strait of Hormuz and everything else, and the war in Ukraine is a for-ever conflict. Not much to write home about for a president who vowed to end all wars.

Netanyahu says no to Trump's Hamas disarmament plan

It has taken him more than a week but now Benjamin Netanyahu has come out and said he rejects the Hamas disarmament peace plan announced with such fanfare by Donald Trump. Well, of course he has. Netanyahu will never agree to any plan which stipulates that Israeli troops must withdraw from Gaza in a phased programme while Hamas throws a few weapons on a pile. The Trump plan is doomed. Hamas agreed to disarm but only on the understanding that Israel would totally withdraw from Gaza. But Netanyahu's future as prime minister rests on him being able to claim victory over Hamas which, in his mind, means the terror organisation must be seen to be disarmed of all weaponry BEFORE he orders any of the Israel Defence Forces to start leaving the Gaza Strip. Currently the IDF controls and occupies more than half of the territory. Now, of course, this will give Hamas the excuse to say to Trump, 'sorry, we're not going to disarm while the IDF refuses to leave Gaza'. Bang goes Trump's dream. It may be a ploy by Netanyahu to stir things up and force Hamas to adopt a different approach. But it seems more likely that between now and the elections in Israel in October, Netanyau is not going to give an inch on Gaza or Hamas.

Iran is going to set new rules for the Strait of Hormuz reopening

It might seem as if a deal between Iran and Oman over the management and administration of the Strait of Hormuz is going to lead to the instant reopening of the chokepoint and a return to the flow of shipping to pre-Iran-war levels. No such luck. Tehran has a much broader concept in mind which will become clear very soon. To further humiliate President Trump, it looks like the Iranian negotiators want the reopening of the strait to be directly linked to every word in the now-maligned Memorandaum of Understanding signed by the US and Iran om June 17. That would mean the US agreeing to lift the naval blockade, allow full exporting of Iranian oil and the unfreezing of financial assets. Iran believes it to be in the ascendancy over the US, so the imminent Iran/Oman arrangement which is bound to include a facility for charging shipping companies for services rendered, will be dependent on a much broader deal with the US, before the strait is fully reopened. This will be the worst outcome for Trump and a huge victory for Tehran. How on earth did it get to this point?

Ending Ukraine war was going to be Trump's legacy

Famously, Donald Trump promised to end the war in Ukraine within twenty-fours of taking office for the second time. Now, no one even suggests in Washington that the US president is even thinking about Russia and Ukraine, let alone banging heads together and getting a deal. Trump is totally focused on Iran and Hamas, and seems to have forgotten his pledge about the war in Ukraine. It's a war that has no end. Ukraine was doing quite well and is now almost daily hitting targets inside Russia, especially oil facilities of every kind to try and reduce the amount of revenue for Moscow to spend on the war. But Ukraine is running out of anti-defence missiles. So Russia is helping itself and striking Kyiv and other towns whenever it likes, killing Ukrainians. The US is also running out of Patriot interceptors, so Zelensky is not going to get any more from Trump, and will have to rely on Europe for some form of missile interceptors. But Europe doesn't have an abundance of these defensive weapons either. So poor Kyiv is going to suffer hits every night without the means to protect citizens. So, the war in Ukraine is not going to end soon. In fact, by the time Trump leaves office in January 2029, the war will still be going on, I predict, and the next president will have the job of trying to get negotiations going. One thing he won't promise is to end the war within twnety-four hours of taking office.

Iran and Oman will do a deal never mind Donald Trump

It doesn't seem to matter any more what Donald Trump says or threatens, the war is going to stop between the US and Iran with the following result: the Strait of Hormuz will be under the control of Iran on the north side and Oman on the south side and both will charge shipping companies "service fees", the half-ton of 60-per-cent-enriched uranium will remain in Iran, buried for the moment under piles of crumbled concrete and earth, the new regime in Tehran will survive and become evem more anti-US and anti-Israel and will continue to threaten the whole region, and Iran's ballistic missile production will keep going. Therefore, nothing, apart from a huge amount of damage to Iran's weapons infrastructure, navy and air defence systems, will have been achieved to ensure any form of lasting peace. Iran will remain the biggest threat to the Middle East and will claim a sort of victory over the US. It's difficult to see how Trump can engineer any other conclusion to this disastrous war.

Is Trump going to allow Iran to control the Strait of Hormuz?

The only talks gpoing on about Iran are the ones between Tehran and Oman about joint administration of the Strait of Hormuz. The focus is on Iran charging a service fee for ships entering the Gulf waterway through the Strait, and Oman charging a similar service fee for ships leaving the Gulf. It looks like Trump had this in mind when he called off the new round of bombing and said there was a deal in the offing. How dramatically things have changed. Not that long ago, Trump and Marco Rubio, his secretary of state and national security adviser, said the only way ahead was for the Strait to be totally opened and free of any kind of fee or toll. This was, after all, the situation before the war was started by the US and Israel. Now, five months later, the Iranians apoear to be on the brink of getting something which is both counter to international maritime law and to the wishes of the White House and every shipping company which uses the Gulf waterway. What an extraordinary and perilous change in circumstances. It's victory for Iran, however it is put by American officials. Now we'll have the Houthis in Yemen saying they want control of the strait linking the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden, and China will be making demands about the Taiwan Strait etc etc. This is definitely the way things are going re Iran because Trump is so frustrated by the way the war has hit him back in the face that he wants an end to it whatever the deal looks like. It's seriously bad news. However, the only alternative is war and more war.

Trump has laid bare the limits of superpowerdom

Iran has been a much much tougher nut to crack than Iraq.The fact that Donald Trump has called off his latest planned mass aistrikes on Iran's power plants and bridges is not a sign of strength on his part but a confession of weakness. He can't defeat Iran or bring its rulers to their knees. The Tehran regime is sinply not going to back down from its absolute red line which is that in future and for eternity the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is going to control the Strait of Hormuz, with or without sharing financial proceeds with Oman across the other side of the chokepoint. Trump said he stopped the strikes because Saudi Arabia and Qatar and Iran asked him to, in return for an imminent, almost-ready settlement deal. Whether Iran put in a call, we don't know. Iran denies it. And Iran has also denied that talks with the US are to renew this afternoon. In fact, the only talks going on have been between Iran and Oman, sorting out who gets what re the Strait of Hormuz to keep it open by way of charging every ship a fee for safe passage. So, there is no imminent deal to end the war. In fact, Iranian rulers, according to reports, have indicated to Trump that if he launches further strikes, they will just respond with widespread missile hits on energy plants across the Gulf region. In other words, Iran has called Trump's bluff. This mighty superpower has been found wanting. It's running out of missiles, both offensive and defensive ones, abd even if there was an inexaustible supply, which there isn't, the US would still not be able to defeat Iran which is a huge country run by people who enjoy war. This is a moment of true disaster for the US and for the US military. China will be grinning all the way to its arms factories.

Trump calls off the new bombing raids

Keeping up with Donald Trump is like running a marathon where the final tape changes location every few minutes. You never know in which direction to go. Yesterday, Trump was definitely in bombing mood and mode. Today, he has had a change of mind. Something happened overnight which made him think maybe Iran would be sensible after all. I don't believe it, the sensible bit, but obviously the leaders of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps read the runes and rang someone to plead for peace. Well, mot peace, but renewed peace talks. Whether anything comes of it we will have to see. But this brinkmanship diplomacy does work sometimes. Maybe the IRGC, basically the rules of Iran, believe it when Trump warned, as he does, that he was planning to destroy every energy plant and bridge and reduce Iran to a pile of rubble. Anyway, a lot of leaders took fright, not just the Iranian ones. Mohammed bin Salman, the de facto leader of Saudi Arabia, rang Trump and urged caution. Please, no escalation, he asked. Others, probably the Pakistanis, Qataris etc, also made phone calls. Trump is suggesting that the new talks will lead, or will have to lead, to the total unhindered reopening of the Strait of Hormuz and no nukes. And he wants the agreement to be rapidly concluded. It's fingers-crossed time for everyone, especially for Trump.

Trump poised for more bombing

There has been a relatively quiet period for a few days but all the signs and signals in Washington are that Donald Trump wants to return to bombing Iran big time. He has been promising to knock out all of Iran's bridges and power plants and it might be on the cards for this coming week. Many of his advisers will be cautioning against it. For a start, it will be devastating for the Iranian people whom he promised to protect and help after the savage regime killed thousands of protesters in the streets of Iran's cities. But also, what will Iran's response be? It will inflame the whole of the Middle East. But Trump is getting more frustrated every hour as he sees the regime in Tehran staying resilient and unmoving. Perhaps Trump hopes that by warning of a massive bombardment in the comping days, the Iranian generals and mullahs will give in and start negotiating again.But if they don't and the bombing starts, no one, especially, Trump, will be able to predict the consequences.