NEW YORK, (APP – UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News – 4th Aug, 2026) President Donald Trump’s repeated pullbacks from massive military strikes on Iran have bolstered Tehran’s narrative that the U.S. fears direct conflict, according to a New York Times analysis.
By utilizing regional allies to threaten critical energy routes, Iran is aiming to leverage this perceived hesitation as a diplomatic advantage, the newspaper said.
Behind the scenes, the administration faces strategic constraints, including concerns over depleting defensive missile stockpiles, according to the dispatch.
On its part, the Times said, Iran has continued to up the ante in its face-off with Washington, and when to return to a short-lived deal to start peace negotiations, which fell apart last month.
“When Mr. Trump signaled in recent days that a major escalation was imminent if no concessions were made, two former Iranian officials said Tehran’s leadership told him to go right ahead,” Times correspondent Erika Solomon wrote.
“They are ready for the war, and they won’t back down,” Amir al-Mousawi, a former Iranian diplomat, who said he had met over the weekend with the team surrounding Iran’s head negotiator and speaker of Parliament, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, was quoted as saying.
Al-Mousawi described an exchange of messages between U.S. and Iranian officials sent over the weekend through Pakistani and Qatari officials, in which he said Trump vowed a severe attack on civilian infrastructure like power plants if the Iranians did not restart negotiations.
The Iranians refused, he said, according to the Times, unless Washington returned to the previously agreed Pakistan-mediated “memorandum of understanding,” which many experts say was in Iran’s favour.
“We have no problem with war at all, and we are ready for the big confrontation,” Al-Mousawi said the Iranians told the Americans. “Trump told the Iranians: ‘I will hit the power in Iran.’ So, the Iranians said: ‘If you strike, we strike.”
Iranian officials have spotted a pattern in Trump’s attempts to shape negotiations, said Sasan Karimi, a former senior Iranian government official and a professor of Iranian studies at the University of Tehran.
“Whenever their messages are exchanged, Mr. Trump starts to pressurize the situation by threatening Iran, so he can try to get further concessions,” he said. “But Iran is not so easily manipulated.” On Sunday, Trump said he had relented from his planned escalation after Iran and other middle Eastern countries requested a delay because the “perimeters of a deal” had been agreed to.
Yet, there are no outward signs of any return to U.S.-Iranian negotiations, it was pointed out. What does appear to have happened is that Saudi Arabia and Qatar expressed concerns over their ability to adequately defend their oil and gas facilities, according to two regional diplomats.
The official Saudi news channel said on Sunday that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia, had recently spoken with Trump to stress “the necessity of prioritizing dialogue to de-escalate tensions” and “prevent a wider conflict.”
Two weeks ago, the Houthis, an Iran-aligned militia force in Yemen, blockaded Riyadh’s use of the Bab al-Mandab waterway in the Red Sea. The Saudis had been piping oil to their west coast port on the Red Sea in order to circumvent Iran’s stranglehold on global shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, the Primary route for oil shipments out of the Persian Gulf.
Then last week, drones struck two major oil facilities in Saudi Arabia, in an attack Riyadh attributed to Iran-backed militias in Iraq. A day later, two ships caught fire in Damietta Port in Egypt, in what the Egyptian authorities said appeared to have been a drone attack and was widely seen by regional analysts as yet another strike by Iran or its proxies.
At the same time, Washington is grappling with depleted stores of munitions. Some military officials say their abilities to fight future conflicts — such as a so-called great-power war against China — could be hobbled by shortages that might take years to reverse, particularly of defensive weapons like Patriot missiles.
“The U.S. military options aren’t great, and it’s not simply reported munitions shortages,” Farzan Sabet, an Iran analyst at the Geneva Graduate Institute in Switzerland, was quoted as saying.
“One, it’s not clear that the limited and time-bound military escalation Trump is willing to undertake at this point will be enough to change Iran’s calculus,” he said. “Two, it’s hard to imagine these options can degrade Iran’s missile and drone capacity, such that it cannot effectively close the Strait of Hormuz or further damage the Gulf’s critical and energy infrastructure.”
Emboldened, some well-known Iranian hard-liners mocked the dilemma the Trump administration seems to find itself in, the dispatch said.
Ebrahim Rezaei, the spokesman of the Iranian Parliament’s national security and foreign policy committee, echoed an earlier threat by Trump in April that he would bomb Iran “back to the Stone Age.”
“If a strike is made on Iran,” Rezaei wrote in a response on X to Mr. Trump’s renewed threats in recent days, “we will return the entire region and its facilities to the Stone Age.”
Far from being closer to talks, some regional experts feel the two sides are further away than ever, according to the report.
