WASHINGTON (AP) — US President Donald Trump has played this hand before during the 5-month-old Iran war.

It starts with a grim warning to Tehran that he’s on the cusp of ordering US forces to “obliterate” its power plants or seize key parts of its oil industry if its leaders don’t quickly agree to US terms to end the war. It ends with him edging away with a last-minute declaration, sometimes at the behest of Gulf allies, that he’s going to give diplomacy more time.

The hardball strategy — one that Trump honed during his years competing in New York’s real estate scene and has employed in politics — aims to create movement in negotiation through pressure and chaos. But the tactic is facing a challenge with an Iranian theocracy that believes it holds a higher threshold for strategic pain than Washington.

While Trump has reveled in the US military decimating layers of Tehran’s leadership and devastating its air force and navy, Iran is betting it can outlast Trump as he faces diminished stockpiles of munitions and the difficulty of executing a war that is unpopular with the American electorate ahead of November’s midterm election

The latest episode began on Friday when Trump, surrounded by his Cabinet, grimly declared that he was “losing faith” in negotiations with Iran and warned that the US military “ will be hitting them very hard.”

Hours later, the White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt heightened speculation in Washington — and around the globe — with an ominous statement asserting “Iran will continue to pay until they come to the table in, what President Trump deems, a meaningful way.”

But by late Saturday night, Trump declared on social media that there were signs of progress on reaching an agreement and he was calling off a plan to carry out new, massive strikes for the time being.

The next day Trump emphasized that requests to give diplomacy more time from unnamed Iranian officials as well as leaders from Gulf allies — Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates — were key to his about-face.

“It would have been disastrous for them. And they didn’t want us to do it,” Trump said of Iran as he spoke to reporters on his way back to Washington from a weekend at his New Jersey golf club. “And frankly, Saudi Arabia didn’t want it either. They thought that a deal is imminent.”

Critics see Trump reaching for a........

© The Times of Israel