With Shuttle Diplomacy Stalled, Trump Counts on Collapse of Iran’s Oil Infrastructure

As President Trump declares Iran’s oil infrastructure days away from imploding and claims in-fighting is roiling Iran’s current leadership, Republicans on Capitol Hill are finding it harder to ignore a deadline on whether to give the president more time to use military force to end Iran’s nuclear ambitions.Tuesday is 60 days since February 28, when the president announced that U.S. forces struck Iranian targets in a move intended to eliminate its leadership and collapse the regime’s nuclear weapons ambitions. Democratic lawmakers opposed to the conflict are planning a new round of efforts to stop Mr. Trump from pursuing additional offensives by exercising congressional authority under the War Powers Act of 1973. The War Powers Act, passed to curb unilateral decision-making by President Nixon after U.S. combat troops pulled out of Vietnam, gives Congress the authority to approve the use of force after 60 days following notification by the president of military action. The notification requirements have been used by every president since Nixon for one conflict or another. The law also allows the president to request a 30-day extension to ensure the safe withdrawal of U.S. troops. Democratic lawmakers in both chambers have introduced War Powers resolutions multiple times since February to end the conflict. GOP senators have rejected five of them, while two resolutions failed in the House. But with the 60-day window closing, Democrats say they plan to accelerate efforts to force a vote. “We need to be having a War Powers resolution that says that this is an illegal war. And I believe we will have the votes to do that,” Representative Ro Khanna told NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday. “That would tie the president’s hands in terms of not being able to get funding to continue this war. That’s how we ended the Vietnam War. It’s how we ended the Iraq War,” he said.Like other presidents before him, Mr. Trump has shrugged off Congress’s insistence that it must authorize armed conflict overseas. Instead, he has maintained singular focus on eliminating Iran’s uranium enrichment program, even as Iranian negotiators refuse to discuss nuclear weapons in the now-stalled peace talks. The president cancelled plans last week to send his negotiating team on the 17-hour flight to Islamabad, where Iranian officials refused to meet face-to-face. Iranian officials, emboldened by the delay, responded over the weekend that the break has only given them time to rebuild Iran’s weapons arsenal. Though initially saying the offensive would take four to five weeks, Mr. Trump, who extended a two-week ceasefire last week, acknowledged Sunday that the ensuing onslaught has resulted in near, but not total, collapse of Iran’s military infrastructure. Nonetheless, he said, America still holds the upper hand. “We have all the cards. If they want to talk, they can come to us, or they can call us. You know, there is a telephone. We have nice, secure lines,” he told Fox News.Refusing direct talks with Americans, over the weekend, Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, who replaced the country’s prime minister, Mohammad Ghalibaf, as chief negotiator upon orders of Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps leaders, presented to Pakistani and Omani mediators his country’s terms for ending the war. Iranian and Pakistani news sources said Mr. Araghchi, who is scheduled to meet Monday with President Vladimir Putin of Russia, offered a three-phase negotiation that first includes an end to military engagement in Lebanon and Iran, followed by discussions on management and administration of the Strait of Hormuz, and then discussion on Iran’s nuclear program. But how long the Iranians can hold out with its latest strategy may depend on the integrity of Iran’s oil wells. The American president suggested Sunday that Iran’s oil production will be forced to shut down due to the blockade, which has prevented Iranian ships from loading tankers and delivering its supplies. Oil analysts have warned that wells that are shut down risk seepage of water, which could cause long-term structural damages and harm future pumping. “When you have lines of vast amounts of oil flowing through your system, if for any reason, that line is closed because you can’t continue to put it in containers or ships — which is what’s happened to them, they have no ships because of the blockade — what happens is that line explodes from within, both mechanically and in the earth,” Mr. Trump said in the Sunday interview. Without a place to store the oil, the rigs will have to stop pumping causing the system to go offline, he added. “A very bad thing is going to happen, so they’re under pressure,” the president said, suggesting that the circumstances will bend the will of Iran’s leadership.In response to the president’s remarks, the vice president of Iran’s Organization for Energy Optimization and Strategic Management, Saghab Esfahani, warned that any damage to its wells will result in quadruple the damage in countries that ally with the United States“If, as Trump claims, any part of our infrastructure—including oil wells—is damaged as a result of the blockade, we guarantee that four times the damage will be inflicted on the same infrastructure in countries that support the aggressor,” he wrote on X. “Our math is different: 1 oil well = 4 oil wells.”With negotiations stalled and the president seemingly reluctant to restart military maneuvers, some Republicans are also pushing now to get official congressional backing for American military operations in the Gulf region. “The authorization for the use of military force could demonstrate to Iran this isn’t just about the president in Iran, this is about the whole of the United States and the U.S. Congress supporting the president through an authorization of the use of military force for the long term, for as long as it takes to get to a lasting peace,” Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina said on NBC’s Meet the Press.The only way to avoid pressure to invoke the War Powers Act is for the White House to provide clarity on its strategic objectives, he added. “We’ve got to do everything we can to support him … and we need to do it by getting clarity from the administration on what they need to do short-term, intermediate-term and long-term, and to what extent Congress can help, and get Democrats on board, fixing problems that their predecessors created,” he said.

With Shuttle Diplomacy Stalled, Trump Counts on Collapse of Iran’s Oil Infrastructure

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