Against the backdrop of a growing global energy crisis that seems set to become more acute with the escalation of the US-Israeli war on Iran, US President Donald Trump performed an apparent U-turn on Monday and spoke of the possibility of de-escalation.
Speaking as the war was coming close to the end of its fourth week, Trump reversed a 48-hour deadline that he had earlier given to Iran to remove all the obstacles to the full and free operation of the Strait of Hormuz or face the total destruction of its power plants and energy infrastructure.
Trump said on Monday that he would postpone the deadline for “a five-day period”, to allow for negotiations that were taking place between Washington and Tehran to find a resolution to the conflict.
While Iran’s Foreign Minister and Speaker of the Iranian Parliament Mohammad Baghr Ghalibaf said that Tehran was not engaged in negotiations with Washington, well-informed sources said that the past week has seen intensive diplomatic moves to introduce de-escalation.
Hours after Trump announced the extension of the deadline that would have hit its 11th hour late on Monday, prices of crude oil fell sharply. However, uncertainty remains over Trump’s intentions. Diplomats say they seem to change so fast that his own administration has difficulty managing their positions and statements.
According to a well-informed Egyptian source, “nothing is certain unless we get a process of indirect negotiations started.” He said that this cannot be expected to happen in a matter of hours. “Go-between offices are being stepped up, and people are working around the clock,” he added.
The immediate objective, he explained, is to create a basis for negotiations for a truce in the war. “I don’t think we can talk about an end to the war right away. I think we are working with our partners towards a truce,” he said.
One source based in an influential Arab Gulf capital said that “some ideas for de-escalation” have been put down by several Arab capitals, among them Egypt, Oman, and Turkey.
He explained that these ideas have been drafted on the basis of high-level consultations with all the parties concerned and with other capitals that have a keen interest in averting “an irreversible escalation that could mean that this war will last for more months rather than more days or weeks.”
He added that several European and Asian capitals have taken part in the consultations, in the hope of abating the energy crisis that has been putting increasing pressure on their economies.
He said that what it will take to arrive at a truce is difficult to know, since the US and Iran would have to reach an agreement on the operation of the Strait of Hormuz.
“The Iranians will not just agree to remove all the obstacles they have put in place without getting something in return,” he said. He added that the mediators are trying to get the Iranians to formulate demands that can be accepted by Trump, while declining to share the Iranian options.
However, according to an Arab diplomat who has served in Tehran, “what Tehran wants will relate to the US-imposed sanctions on its oil sales and its frozen assets.”
He explained that with all the damage that Iran has suffered during this “horrible war, the Iranian [regime] needs to increase its revenues, especially in view of the severe economic crisis that the Iranians have been suffering from.”
Since the mid-1990s, Iran has come under increasing sanctions that have hit its energy, financial, transport, and shipping sectors. The sanctions had escalated in the early 2010s before they declined upon the signing of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the nuclear deal with Iran, in July 2015.
During his first term in office, Trump pulled the US out of this agreement.
The sources agree that there are two crucial points that need to be addressed before Tehran and Washington can come to an agreement on a truce, with one source saying that these “seem to be on the wish list of both capitals”.
They said that one of these conditions has to be managed by the US while the second needs to be managed by Iran.
The first is for Trump to satisfy the key Iranian condition of getting Israel to pull out of the war. According to the Gulf-based source, “for the Iranians this is a US-Israeli war, and there can be no truce with one and not the other.”
So far, he added, there are no signs that Trump has been able to get Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to agree to a truce.
The second condition, the sources said, is for the scattered Iranian leadership to come to an agreement on what will be an acceptable deal for Tehran. In his statements on Monday, Trump said that the US was talking to the “top person” in Iran.
“As Trump said, today there is no top person as such in Iran,” said the diplomat who served in Tehran. Trump is probably talking about Ghalibaf, he said.
“But whoever is being approached by the mediators, nothing is going to be done without the greenlight of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps [IRGC],” he added.
The sources agreed that the leaders of the IRGC who have survived the assassination attempts of the US and Israel are the ones who call the shots now in Iran. The newly named supreme leader of the country, Mojtaba Khamenei, is not yet fully in charge, they added.
Some sources said that Mojtaba Khamenei is being kept in a secret hiding place. Others said that it is widely assumed that he is being treated outside Iran after being wounded in the 28 February strikes that killed his father, former supreme leader Ali Khamenei, along with other family members.
None of the sources who spoke to Al-Ahram Weekly would speculate on which way things could go. They mostly argued that it is a “50-50” situation and that “anything could happen,” especially since the war is still unfolding and the chances of a truce could be aborted.
The sources added that reaching a truce would only be the first step towards stopping the war. To fully stop the conflict, they said, there are many other factors that would have to be incorporated, including the Israeli war on Lebanon that has escalated over the past few weeks, the fate of the pro-Iran groups in Lebanon, Iraq, and Yemen, and the security system in the Gulf.
According to the source in the Gulf, “no one should underestimate the anxiety that has hit the [Arab] Gulf after what has happened this past month.” He added that today some Arab Gulf capitals have clear demands that relate to Iran’s long-range missile capacity.
The sources agree that it might be weeks or months before the war comes fully to an end. Whenever it ends, they added, it will have created a new mode of operation across the region, whereby intelligence and security cooperation will be a top priority, especially for Iran’s direct neighbours in the Arab Gulf.
“Israel might come out of the war with a sense of satisfaction at having profoundly hurt Iran’s nuclear and missile capacities,” a diplomat who had previously served in Israel said.
However, he added that with the regime in Tehran surviving the current crisis, Netanyahu will continue to plan for another war.
Netanyahu and Trump were convinced that the war would not take long to topple the Iranian regime. However, the regime showed resilience, and the Iranian opposition declined to come out under the cover of an American-Israeli war.
According to the diplomat who served in Tehran, “in the final analysis and despite the huge damage sustained by Iran, it has not lost to the US and Israel.”
A few days ago, Trump said that changing the regime in Iran was not an objective for Washington. In his Monday statements, however, he said that there are various forms of regime change, including the introduction of a new leadership.
He added that he would be working with Iran’s new leader to decide on how the Strait of Hormuz will operate. It will be “me and the Ayatollah, whoever the Ayatollah is,” Trump said.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 26 March, 2026 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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