Iran just raised the price of Trump’s waiting game

A week ago, U.S. officials say President Trump was on the verge of ordering a return to major combat operations against Iran. This weekend, he described a different posture entirely. “We are low keying it,” he told Axios in an interview Sunday, describing an approach built on economic pressure rather than new strikes. “We are only semi-negotiating with them. We are just watching Iran with its huge inflation and the fact they have no money.” Asked about the standoff, he added: “It will work out. It always works out. It’s like a chess game.”

That is not a fifth declaration of victory. It is something more evasive: a retreat from measurable claims to an open-ended assertion that patience will eventually work — a proposition that cannot be disproved on any timetable the White House has identified. A claim of total victory, a predicted reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, an announced military deadline — those can be tested against events, and have been, four times, and failed. “It always works out” cannot. It defers judgment indefinitely.

Tehran did not wait to test it.

On Saturday, Mohammad Bagher Zolghadr, then still secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, laid out six conditions the U.S. would have to meet before the Strait of Hormuz reopens: an end to American “threats” and “insults”; a permanent end to attacks on Iran-aligned groups in Lebanon, the Palestinian territories, Yemen and Iraq; the lifting of what Tehran calls a U.S. naval blockade and withdrawal of American forces from the region; compensation for what he called two “imposed wars”; the lifting of sanctions; and the unconditional release of Iran’s frozen assets abroad. Iran has turned a negotiation over passage through Hormuz into a negotiation over the........

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