‘Frozen conflict’: Fears Iran and the US will never come to a peace deal

Added: 2026-05-20

[00:00:00]I'm going to go to the global affairs at the moment and we'll start off on what's going to happen in Iran because Donald Trump is still keeping everybody in the world waiting, not to mention the Iranians of course who waiting to see what he's going to do next. Here's the latest from the Donald.

[00:00:16]We were going to be striking very it would have been happening right now.

[00:00:20]Yeah, it was all done. The boats, the ships are all loaded. They're loaded to the brim.

[00:00:25]And we're all set to start. They knew I was getting ready to attack. I didn't tell them. I never tell anybody when.

[00:00:31]You're in constant contact >> tell anybody when. But but they knew that we were very close. I would say we were I was an hour away from making the decision to go today.

[00:00:42]Let's bring in Tom Switzer, columnist with the Australian. There he is talking about his his new ballroom there at the White House but focusing mainly on Iran.

[00:00:50]We're waiting yet again. Of course they would be ready for to strike. The American military have been there for weeks with their fingers hovering over the buttons but is it a good sign that President Trump keeps delaying a new military assault?

[00:01:05]>> I think it's a sign Chris that he's well and truly trapped. If he decides to escalate and the US starts bombing Iranian civilian infrastructure and power plants, that will surely ignite retaliation by the Iranians and they'll hit at America's Sunni Gulf allies and that will only just increase the prospects of a regional war and an economic shock, possibly a global recession. So it's in Trump's interest to actually shut it down. But in the meantime, the blockades in place, surely the Iranian economy is being strangled.

[00:01:35]>> It is being strangled but as we've discussed before, the Iranians recognize or the regime at least recognizes it's in a it's facing an existential threat from the Americans and the Iranians and they'll go to great lengths to fight on.

[00:01:46]>> [snorts] >> If the key here is that the processed uranium >> Mhm.

[00:01:51]um then obviously the Americans don't know where it is or or it's deep buried deeply enough for them um not to be able to bomb it because if you take that out then that central aim of neutralizing their nuclear aspirations is done.

[00:02:07]Look, the Americans need that uranium if they want to commit have a successful mission.

[00:02:14]The problem is is that the United States is in no mood to escalate the conflict for the reasons I mentioned.

[00:02:19]And that means that Trump will need to do a deal with the Iranians that somehow preserves American credibility and prestige and that's going to be a very difficult thing to do because the Iranians have more leverage than Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu envisioned when they ordered the air strikes on February 28th. Yeah, you see I tend to agree with that assessment except I'd flip it around. The Iranians need to do a deal with Trump, don't they? They can't I can't go on like this. Well, they they want a deal in the sense that they want reparations and they want sanctions >> to get that. They're not going to get that. They're not going to get that.

[00:02:51]They're not going to get that. So, how do you square that circle? See, this is the thing they've got fundamentally incompatible goals. It's a bit like the Ukrainians and the Russians. How do you square these circles? So, I think we're going to have a frozen conflict, but in the meantime the Strait of Hormuz looks likely to be closed and that is a bad thing for the world economy. It sure is.