President Donald Trump told the Financial Times that his administration is weighing several military options in Iran, among them seizing Kharg Island. The Wall Street Journal reported that he is also looking at an operation to pull out Iran’s uranium.
At the same time, Trump insisted negotiations with Tehran were going “extremely well.” The Council on Foreign Relations described the war as sitting on the edge of a wider escalation.
Weekend of strikes
The fighting did not pause for the talk of diplomacy. Since Friday, Iran has hit aluminum plants in Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates, and it struck a U.S. airbase in Saudi Arabia. Unnamed U.S. officials told several news outlets that twelve American troops were wounded there and a number of aircraft were damaged.
Iranian state media said U.S.-Israeli strikes landed on a uranium processing plant, along with universities in Tehran and Isfahan.
The Houthis fired a missile at Israel on Saturday, the group’s first such attack of the war. It came after more U.S. Marines arrived in the region. Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, Iran’s parliamentary speaker, warned that Tehran would set American troops “on fire” if a ground operation begins, state media reported.
In Lebanon, a UN peacekeeper and three Lebanese journalists died over the weekend in fighting between Israel and Hezbollah.
Pakistan offers a venue
Pakistan led a round of talks with regional leaders, though no U.S. or Iranian officials took part. The discussion centered on ways to secure shipping through the Strait of Hormuz. Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Turkey sent senior officials.
Afterward Pakistan’s foreign minister said Islamabad was ready to host U.S.-Iran talks. Neither government confirmed a date. Iran’s foreign ministry also dismissed a fifteen-point U.S. peace plan, saying it contained “excessive, unrealistic, and irrational demands.”
The Council on Foreign Relations argued that the war’s growing list of players makes a ceasefire harder to impose and to hold. In its words, “an emergent coalition of mediators led by Egypt, Pakistan, and Turkey must mobilize to pressure Iran and the United States to expedite a ceasefire agreement.”
Spillover in Europe
French authorities arrested three people over the weekend in an anti-terrorism probe into an attempted bomb attack on Bank of America’s Paris offices. France’s interior minister said the foiled plot could be tied to the Iran war and pointed to similar attempts in other European countries. Iran’s embassy in France had not commented.
The Group of Seven finance and energy ministers were due to meet to discuss the war.
