Igor Gielow
São Paulo, SP (Folhapress)-Ayatollah Ali Khamenei rejected Donald Trump’s ultimatum, which required the country’s unconditional surrender to Israel’s attacks since Friday (13).
The American president, in turn, spent the Wednesday (18) suspenseful about the adhesion or not to the air offensive launched by his ally Binyamin Netanyahu. According to the Wall Street Journal, Trump has already approved an attack plan, but did not give OK end.
Khamenei was the first to speak in his first speech from the first day of the war. He stated that the eventual US entry into the conflict “will be accompanied undoubtedly by irreparable damage.”
“Smart people who know Iran, the Iranian nation and its history will never speak to this nation in threatening language because the Iranian nation will not surrender,” he said, according to what was read on TV. The physical absence of the leader on the screen drew attention, but then his image reading the text was conveyed, presumably recorded.
Asked about the speech by reporters, Trump wished “good luck” to the opponent. He refused to say whether or not to attack Iran and said the US was sought by Tehran, although it considers that “it is very late to talk.”
“There is a big difference between now and a week ago,” he said at the White House, referring to that moment, when there was a round of conversations about the Iranian nuclear program scheduled for Sunday (15). “No one knows what I’m going to do,” he said.
Later, before a meeting on the subject, he said Iran may still talk to Americans, but he had not decided to take. After the meeting, the American newspaper reported the initial approval of the plan.
Another publication, the New York Times, said Iran will soon make an official proposal to resume the dialogue about its nuclear program, whose collapse in negotiations was Israel’s initial justification to attack them Aiatalas, which lead a regime that preaches the extinction of the Jewish state, would be close to having the atomic bomb.
On Tuesday (17), Trump had said that Khamenei was “an easy target” and that the US knew where he “hid.” The American then threatened him without subtlety, saying that the US would not kill him “for now.”
The expectation is about what Washington will do. Israel had already exchanged direct attacks with Iran in two rounds last year, but the Americans acted to flutter the crisis, because a war that became regional was not interested in anyone.
But the government of Netanyahu, in the face of the debacle of Iran-it conversations, decided to go ahead alone, something previously seen as unthinkable.
Not only did I see the Iranian atomic program, a task that to be completed needs the American hand, but its defensive capabilities and military leaders. Khamenei himself became a priority target, according to the premie and, less directly, according to Trump.
Everything can be only US pressure, hitchhiking in Israeli action that support anyway. But the perspective of a larger war, especially with Washington shifting military forces to the Middle East, scares other actors.
In Russia, an ally of Iran who paradoxically benefits from the lack of focus on his own war in Ukraine and rising the price of oil that finances the forces of Vladimir Putin, Wednesday was criticized.
The deputy chancer Serguei Riabkov said any American action would destabilize the entire Middle East. There are myriads of small groups that can threaten US interests in the region and beyond, not to talk about the global terrorist threat. Moscow and Tehran have a strategic pact that does not provide for mutual help in case of aggression.
Riabkov said Russia is still willing to mediate the conflict, serving as a depository of excess enriched uranium by the Iranians, for example. In conversation with United Arab Emirates President Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan, Putin reiterated the need for a negotiated solution.
Already in Türkiye, which also lives his contradiction because he is opposing both Tehran and Tel Aviv, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan again said that Iran is entitled to defend itself. Obviously, he will do nothing, because he is a US ally at NATO, and his speech must be read as addressed to his conservative Islamic base.
