Trump calls off the Sunday strike

Donald Trump cancelled a strike on Iran set for Sunday 2 August, hours after posting on Truth Social that the United States was "locked and loaded and ready to go against the Islamic Republic of Iran, at levels of Military Terror, Strength, and Power not seen since World War II"⁠¹. He held off at the request of Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, according to the Associated Press account carried by Al Jazeera⁠². Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman made the case himself, telling Trump that an Iranian answer landing on Gulf states would reach the global economy⁠³. By Trump's own telling, unnamed Iranian officials asked for the halt as well⁠⁴.

Every previous brake on this campaign came from inside the American government. General Dan Caine, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, warned Trump about munitions stocks in late July and the bombing stopped. The Senate then refused to bind the President under the War Powers Resolution, the 1973 statute that gives a president two days to notify Congress he has sent forces into hostilities and 60 days to bring them home without its authorisation. This halt carries a foreign head of state's name instead, which changes who a shipowner, an insurer or a Gulf finance ministry has to lobby to move an American strike calendar.

Trump set out his terms in capitals: "immediate, complete, and total OPENING OF THE HORMUZ STRAIT" and an end to Iran's nuclear threat⁠⁵⁠⁶. Wire accounts put the American side of that trade as lifting the naval blockade and letting Iran sell oil again, which is the reporting's reading of an implied exchange rather than a term Trump is quoted offering⁠⁷. He told reporters negotiations resume at the start of the week, naming neither the venue nor the parties⁠⁸.

Tehran has matched none of that in public. Iran's security chief was promising attacks until "total surrender" days before the cancellation, and Bahraini and Kuwaiti aircraft had already flown their own runs at Iranian depots earlier in July with Emirati intelligence behind them. The Gulf states now credited with stopping an American strike are not bystanders to the war they asked Washington to slow down.