In a display of maximum pressure tempered by a nuclear taboo, President Donald Trump has declared that Iran is rapidly running out of time to conclude a settlement, even as he explicitly ruled out using atomic weapons in the conflict. Speaking to reporters in the Oval Office and in a series of combative social media posts, the American leader insisted he felt no urgency to end the war, warning instead that time was slipping away for Tehran. “I have all the time in the world, but Iran doesn’t — the clock is ticking!” he wrote, brushing aside suggestions that his administration was anxious for a quick resolution. He then dismissed the notion of a nuclear strike as a “stupid question,” arguing that conventional operations had already “decimated” Iran’s armed forces.

Viewed from Washington, Trump’s rhetoric is calibrated to signal overwhelming American dominance while closing off the most escalatory avenue. He described Iran’s navy as sunk, its air force demolished, and its air defences and radars destroyed, claims that underpinned his insistence that a deal would only be struck “when it is appropriate and good for the USA, our allies, and frankly the rest of the world.” The Pentagon released footage of US forces boarding a tanker seized in the Indian Ocean for transporting Iranian oil, reinforcing the narrative of a tight maritime stranglehold. Yet the president’s order to the navy to “shoot and kill” any Iranian minelaying boats in the Strait of Hormuz underscores a persistent threat from the very forces he says have been eliminated. The Islamic Republic’s swarm of small, fast-attack craft — its so-called mosquito fleet — remains a menace to commercial shipping and US warships, a reminder that the waterway, through which a fifth of global crude passes, is far from fully pacified.

From Tehran, the response has been defiant. President Masoud Pezeshkian and top negotiator Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf dismissed American claims of leadership turmoil and insisted Iran would “make the aggressor regret.” Iranian officials have broadcast their own version of pressure: claiming to have collected toll revenues from commercial vessels of hostile nations navigating the Gulf. Analysts in Moscow note that the Russian media has prominently covered Trump’s ultimatums, framing the standoff as a dangerous test of American resolve with global economic consequences. In European capitals, particularly Rome, attention is fixed on the effective sealing of Hormuz, which is strangling trade and injecting deep uncertainty into energy markets just as the world economy braces for further shocks.

Israel, an intensely interested spectator, is watching the diplomatic stall with growing impatience. Officials in Jerusalem have signalled they are awaiting Washington’s “green light” to resume full-scale hostilities against Iran, with rhetoric about returning the Islamic Republic “to the Stone Age” circulating among hardline quarters. The two-week ceasefire, repeatedly extended, has provided a fragile pause, but Trump himself allowed that Iran may have replenished its arsenal “a little bit” during the lull — though he boasted that American forces could eliminate those gains in a single day. His admission undercuts the image of total annihilation, hinting at a grinding war of attrition rather than a swift knockout.

The path forward appears narrow. Trump has demonstrated he will not be stampeded into a deal, and his nuclear firmness draws a line that even the most anxious allies can welcome. Yet by squeezing Hormuz with ever-tighter naval blockades and threatening to annihilate any minelayer, Washington is playing a high-stakes game of brinkmanship. Tehran, its conventional forces battered but its asymmetric options intact, faces a choice between capitulation under severe terms or a prolonged confrontation that holds the global economy hostage. Viewed from London and Berlin, the worry is that a single miscalculation — a swarming attack on a US destroyer, an Israeli pre-emptive strike — could shatter the extended ceasefire and plunge the region into a wider conflagration that no nuclear red line can fully contain.