Financial Times:

Roula Khalaf is Deputy Editor of the Financial Times, and used to be Assistant Editor and Foreign Editor.

The fiery rhetoric soared from one side; the provocations escalated from the other. The superpower’s submarine and aircraft carrier were deployed, and the allies were briefed about military plans should it come to conflict. These were the drum beats of war around this time in 2017 when Donald Trump raised the stakes in his fight with North Korea to such levels that many diplomats around the world assumed conflict was inevitable.

Instead of confrontation, the US president and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un launched into an unlikely romance , embracing a make-believe diplomatic process that, despite having stalled, has turned the threat of war on the Korean peninsula into a distant one.

A similarly tense mood has settled over the Gulf, as the decades-old hostility between the US and Iran reaches a new climax. Since the Trump administration withdrew from the landmark 2015 nuclear accord, denying Iran the agreement’s economic benefits, it has piled continuous pressure on the Islamic Republic. With Iran hawks — most notably John Bolton , the US national security adviser who has in the past argued for bombing Iran — sounding ever more belligerent, allies fear that Washington is talking itself into a repeat of the 2003 Iraq war.

But what stands between war and peace in the Gulf is Mr Trump himself. Having promised to end Middle Eastern wars, rather than start new ones, he appears driven less by a desire for military conflict than by the illusion that he can apply the North Korea playbook to Iran. It is not war he seeks but a return to negotiations — on his own, tougher terms. “I’d like to see them call me,” Mr Trump has said of Iranian leaders.

The same script will not produce the same outcome, however. Iran is not North Korea — not in the nature of its regime or society, not in its history or economic conditions. Tehran reacted with restraint to the US pullout from the nuclear deal, at the urging of European powers that have stuck with it. But as the US has tightened the noose, that restraint has given way to threats. Iran has now warned it will stop complying with parts of the deal.

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