Cabot Phillips

What changed here?

Yeah, the reality is the gap between Trump and Iran never really closed.

There was just a lot of talk and rumors that papered over that fact.

Things were mostly at a stalemate on Friday, and then once something went wrong, the whole thing sort of stalled.

And according to Iran, that trigger was Israel.

Over the weekend, Iran said that it's suspending talks and all messages through mediators after Israeli strikes on Hezbollah over the weekend.

For their part, the Israelis said they were responding to violations of the ceasefire from those terrorists with Hezbollah.

It looked like the hot war between Israel and Hezbollah was resuming at full speed until Donald Trump appeared to de-escalate the situation.

The president posted on Truth Social yesterday that following a, quote, very productive call with Netanyahu as well as Hezbollah leaders, that there would be, quote, no troops going to Beirut and that Hezbollah had, quote, agreed that all shooting will stop, that Israel will not attack them and they will not attack Israel.

Now, whether that holds true and its potential implications for rekindling the Iran negotiations remain to be seen.

The situation is still very much in flux.

And to that point, President Trump actually refuted claims that talks were dead, claiming on Truth Social that they were still moving forward, quote, rapidly.

Yeah, President Trump has yet to waver on his demand that Iran give up its entire uranium stockpile, roughly 10 warheads worth of material.

And that has and will almost certainly continue to be the toughest issue to get through.

To put it simply, Trump is not budging and neither are the Iranians.

They know that that is their main point of leverage internationally.

In fact, they won't even agree to nuclear talks being part of any ceasefire extension framework.

Their second priority is money, and that involves demands for control of the strait and unfreezing of billions of Iranian assets.

Both of those issues have also been non-starters for the Trump administration so far.

So unless something changes, even if talks resume, both sides are still kind of in a stalemate.