IT has been a roller-coaster week with President Donald Trump talking of a peace deal with Iran and issuing ultimatums of military escalation in the same breath. Hopes that he might be looking for an off-ramp were raised when he postponed threatened attacks on Iran’s power plants and claimed US officials were in talks with Iranian counterparts that were progressing well.

When news emerged of Pakistan playing go-between, the possibility gained ground of a diplomatic path out of the crisis. Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif’s offer to host talks catapulted Pakistan to the centre of diplomatic efforts and suggested serious behind-the-scenes activity aimed at de-escalation that was also coordinated with Turkiye and Egypt. That President Trump and army chief Field Marshal Asim Munir spoke on the phone before Islamabad’s public offer underlined Pakistan’s emergence as the key intermediary.

But there was no indication from Tehran that talks were imminent. Iran’s parliamentary speaker Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf signalled Tehran wasn’t yet ready for negotiations. He said optimism about talks “is being used to manipulate the financial and oil markets and escape the quagmire in which the US and Israel are trapped”. An Iranian military spokesman accused Trump of “negotiating with himself”.

Uncertainty reigns over the possibility of talks with the positions of the two sides being so far apart. Messages exchanged through an intermediary allow both sides to test the seriousness of the other and scope out future engagement but cannot be deemed negotiations. Meanwhile, there has been no let-up in US and Israeli attacks on Iran while Iran’s retaliatory........

© Dawn