It smells more like $200 per barrel oil and burning tankers than peace, says a political strategist about Iran

Political strategist Mikhail Sheitelman explained that the United States and Iran have the same mutually exclusive conditions for peace as Ukraine and Russia, so peace is nowhere in sight, Politeka reports. He shared this on his blog.

“Trump wants to end the war, but his timelines… He has started to remind me of Putin. Seriously, in this war Trump has started to remind me of Putin. Putin and Ukraine, Trump and Iran. You know that I support the United States and Israel in this war, but U.S. policy has started to resemble Russian policy: the initial push didn’t work, and now there’s no clear plan. New deadlines keep being set again—‘we’ll finish in two weeks,’ ‘Tehran in three days.’ This is all heading in the wrong direction…,” Mikhail Sheitelman notes.

The WSJ writes, he says, that Trump wants to end the war with Iran by mid-May, largely because a meeting with Xi Jinping has been rescheduled for May 14–15. However, the expert explains, the problem is that the meeting with Xi can be postponed again and again—it’s like a horizon that keeps receding as you approach it.

“It smells more like $200 per barrel oil and burning tankers than peace. Trump has found himself in a situation where he can feel what we feel: the Ukrainian negotiating position and the Russian negotiating position. Because there are two ultimatums—an American one and an Iranian one—just like in our case with the Russians,” Sheitelman argues.

Ukraine, he states, wants Russia to withdraw its troops from occupied territories, hand over all war criminals, return abducted children, and pay reparations. Meanwhile, the Russians want us to give them everything, to let the Kremlin appoint Ukraine’s president, and for us to give up weapons—and these positions have not changed after all the negotiations. The same situation exists for Trump, he emphasizes: the U.S. wants Iran to abandon its nuclear program and missiles and to unblock the Strait of Hormuz, while Iran wants the U.S. to compensate its losses, ensure the strait is under its control, provide non-aggression guarantees, withdraw its bases from the Middle East, and lift sanctions. So, he concludes, Trump tried to reconcile the irreconcilable with us, and now he will try to do the same in the Middle East.

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