Katty Kay

That is the way that conflicts end.

Escalation, Donald Trump doesn't want, but I'm not ruling it off the table.

I think there are still hawks, as you and I have said, in the administration and in the Pentagon who want this to continue.

I was texting this morning with somebody who speaks to the president pretty regularly,

who said, you know, the tussle is actually between Vance and the Pentagon, but also between Vance and Rubio.

Rubio is more in the UAE camp, which is we have to make sure we finish this and can walk away with something that actually looks like victory and is not just a kind of piece of paper that says the Iranians aren't going to do something which they may well end up going to do.

He's more kind of long-termist about this, that you can't leave a regime in place that is, whatever we do now, going to then still develop a nuclear weapon.

Or try to 10, 20 years down the line.

So I think that is one option.

The calling victory, that is clearly what Trump would like to do to be able to frame this as a victory.

But that's where I think the events of this morning make it more complicated if he's going to carry on this Operation Freedom campaign.

Shipping experts are already telling every reporter who will call them, we are not going to go through just because the president tells us it's okay to go through.

We're not going to go through the straits because our ships are too expensive.

They're worth too much money for us.

We need a naval escort.

And the president doesn't want to do a naval escort.

His initial thinking was we're going to announce a naval escort.

Then he watered it down, and now it's this sort of central command idea of a call center, basically, where you can call in and find out where the best lane is.

But I think there is a risk with that that this either just fizzles out, this big announcement that he had over the weekend of a kind of, we're going to have this Operation Freedom, or if it carries on, there is a serious risk of some kind of escalation.

The multilateral thing, you've been saying for a while, they need to get the Chinese on board.