Trump Threatens Iran and Then Pulls Back, All in the Same Day

 

Trump Threatens Iran and Then Pulls Back, All in the Same Day

 

President Trump has repeatedly said he’ll restart military action against Iran, only to stop short of plunging the United States directly back into an unpopular war.

 

Tyler Pager Eric Schmitt

By Tyler Pager and Eric Schmitt

Reporting from Washington

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/18/us/politics/trump-iran-strikes.html

May 18, 2026

 

President Trump said Monday that he had authorized a new wave of attacks against Iran this week but that he was holding off to make room for “serious negotiations,” after he said three Gulf leaders requested more time to work out a nuclear deal.

 

Mr. Trump has repeatedly threatened to launch new strikes, only to pull back at the last minute from plunging the United States back into an unpopular, expensive war. On Monday, he confirmed plans to strike and canceled them at the same time.

 

“We were getting ready to do a very major attack tomorrow, and I put it off for a little while, hopefully maybe forever, but possibly for a little while, because we’ve had very big discussions with Iran, and we’ll see what they amount to,” Mr. Trump told reporters.

 

When Mr. Trump launched the war alongside Israel on Feb. 28, he estimated that it would end in four to five weeks. The conflict is now in its third month, and Mr. Trump is caught between dueling impulses: to force Iran into submission, and to declare victory and move on.

 

The result has been wildly contradictory statements about the war — at one point Mr. Trump said the war was “over” but the United States still needed to finish the job — and bombastic threats like the one he issued in April, when he warned that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.” (He backed down before his self-imposed deadline.)

 

U.S. military officials say that the Iranian regime has demonstrated enormous resilience and the ability to inflict significant damage to the region and on the global economy. And so far, Iran’s nuclear stockpile has not been touched.

 

Still, the military campaign has hit Iran hard: the Pentagon estimates it has destroyed some 13,000 targets, eviscerated the country’s Navy and killed high-level military and intelligence leaders, including Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the nation’s supreme leader for almost 37 years.

 

The war remains deeply unpopular at home. A New York Times/Siena poll found that 64 percent of voters said Mr. Trump’s decision to go to war with Iran was the wrong one, with a majority of voters registering discontent about the economic costs associated with the conflict.

 

As the fallout continues, negotiations on Iran’s nuclear program and the Strait of Hormuz have stalled. Mr. Trump has rejected multiple proposals from Iran, demanding more concessions on their nuclear program. On Monday, Mr. Trump said the leaders of Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates asked him to postpone military strikes because they believed they could strike a deal with Iran that would satisfy the United States.

 

“So I was called by these three countries, plus others, and they’re dealing directly with our people, and right now Iran, and there seems to be a very good chance that they can work something out,” Mr. Trump said. “If we can do that without bombing the hell out of them, I’d be very happy.”

 

Mr. Trump reiterated that he would require any deal to prohibit Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons. That very demand, however, has been among the biggest impediments to an agreement between the United States and Iran, as the two countries have been unable to come to terms on a nuclear deal.

 

Mr. Trump did not specify what targets the United States had planned to strike on Tuesday, but officials said the military had developed a variety of options, including targeting the country’s ballistic missile sites.

 

Earlier, on social media, Mr. Trump said he told his top military officials to prepare for a “full, large scale assault of Iran” if “an acceptable Deal is not reached.”

 

Some U.S. officials cautioned that Mr. Trump’s public pronouncement could be a form of misdirection and that he could still move ahead with strikes. The officials noted that in February, American and Iranian officials planned a round of negotiations just days before the United States and Israel started the war.

 

Iran has used the monthlong cease-fire with the United States to dig out scores of bombed ballistic missile sites, move mobile missile launchers, and, despite significant losses, adjust its tactics for any resumption of strikes, said a U.S. military official who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss operational matters.

 

Many of Iran’s ballistic missiles were deployed from deep underground caves and other facilities carved out of granite mountains that are difficult for American attack aircraft to destroy, the official said. As a result, the United States largely bombed the portals of the sites, collapsing and burying them, but not destroying them. Iran has now dug out a significant number of those sites.

 

Iranian commanders, possibly with Russian help, studied the flight patterns of American fighter jets and bombers, the U.S. military official said. The official warned that the downing of the F-15E jet last month and the groundfire that struck an F-35 revealed that American flight tactics had become too predictable in ways that allowed Iran to defend against them more capably.

 

Perhaps most important, the U.S. military official said that while five weeks of intensive bombing may have killed several Iranian leaders and commanders, the war has left a more hardened, resilient adversary. The official added that the Iranians had repositioned many of their remaining arms and instilled a belief that Iran can successfully resist the United States, whether by effectively blocking the Strait of Hormuz, attacking energy infrastructure in neighboring Gulf states or threatening U.S. aircraft.

 

Tyler Pager is a White House correspondent for The Times, covering President Trump and his administration.

 

Eric Schmitt is a national security correspondent for The Times. He has reported on U.S. military affairs and counterterrorism for more than three decades. Contact him securely on Signal: ericschmitt.36.