“The fact is, we’re nowhere and we may well be heading back toward escalation,” said Aaron David Miller, senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a former State Department Middle East analyst and negotiator, in a Saturday interview with Audacy’s KCBS Radio in the Bay Area.
Miller was referring to the state of potential negotiations between the U.S. and Iran as we look to possibly enter yet another month of conflict in May. President Donald Trump announced that the U.S. had joined Israel to bomb Iran in late February. Since then, he has cited a variety of reasons for the action, from decades-long tension between the nations to student protests held there before the conflict began.
While Trump also said the conflict was expected to be short, it has dragged on and Iran has blocked the Strait of Hormuz, a key route for global oil transportation. With the strait blocked, oil prices have gone up in the U.S. and other countries. As of this Saturday, national average prices for a gallon of gas in the U.S. were higher than $4 per gallon, according to AAA.
United States Special Envoy to the Middle East Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, were headed to Islamabad, Pakistan, this weekend for peace talks without Vice President JD Vance. He went on a previous trip for peace talks with Iranians but was on “standby” for this one, POLITICO reported.
Then, Trump called off the peace talks altogether.
“I just cancelled the trip of my representatives going to Islamabad, Pakistan, to meet with the Iranians. Too much time wasted on traveling, too much work! Besides which, there is tremendous infighting and confusion within their ‘leadership,’” said the president in a Saturday Truth Social post. “Nobody knows who is in charge, including them. Also, we have all the cards, they have none! If they want to talk, all they have to do is call!!!”
However, Miller has a slightly different perspective regarding how things stand.
“I think… Iranians are playing the long game. They’re going to argue over every detail. They believe that they have the advantage, they’ve deployed geography – they’ve weaponized the Strait of Hormuz, they survived an onslaught military campaign by the world’s most preeminent military in the United States and… the region’s most preeminent military in the Israeli Defense Force.”
To sum things up, Miller doesn’t think Iran is in a hurry, even if they might not want to return to the battlefield.
“In essence, they’re prepared to hold out,” he said. Meanwhile, data still suggests there is little support for the war in Iran from the American people.
Fox News reported this week that its new poll showed 55% of people oppose the war, even as support increased from 42% to 45%. Marquette Law School poll results released Wednesday showed that 75% of respondents approve of the cease-fire in the U.S.-Iran war and 63% of people said there were not sufficient reasons for the war.
