By Sahiba Tahleel
On Wednesday morning, Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth stood in front of reporters at the Pentagon and didn’t bother to soften his message. Hegseth wanted the world to know who, in his opinion, blinked first after the U.S. and Iran agreed to a ceasefire. “Iran begged for this ceasefire, and we all know it,” he said.
The briefing happened just a few hours after President Donald Trump backed off from a big escalation. Trump agreed to stop planned bombing operations for a couple of weeks after Iran agreed to reopen the Strait of Hormuz.
The deal, which was brokered by Pakistan, came about an hour before Trump’s self-imposed Tuesday evening deadline. This deadline came with clear threats of devastating strikes on Iranian infrastructure.
According to the report by the Independent, Hegseth says that on Tuesday night alone, before the ceasefire went into effect, the U.S. carried out more than 800 attacks on Iran. These attacks “completely” destroyed Iran’s defence industrial base.
He referred to the next set of targets that were ready to go if Iran didn’t agree to a deal. Power plants, bridges, and oil and energy infrastructure were all on the list of targets. Hegseth said that Iran couldn’t defend itself or realistically recover for decades.
General Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, was at the briefing with Hegseth. As per ABC7 News, He said that the U.S. had met all three of Trump’s original military goals: destroying Iran’s drone and ballistic missile capabilities, eliminating the Iranian Navy, and crushing Iran’s defence industrial base.
Caine, on the other hand, was careful to point out the ceasefire’s limits. “Ceasefire is a pause,” he said. He also said that U.S. forces are still ready to start fighting again with the same speed and accuracy they have shown over the past 38 days, if needed, as Kare 11 reported.
The deal also has effects on nuclear weapons. According to ABC7 New York, Hegseth said that the U.S. is keeping an eye on Iran’s enriched uranium and that giving it up is a “non-negotiable” condition for the future.
Trump also said in a separate post that the new deal won’t allow uranium enrichment and that the U.S. will work to get rid of what he called deeply buried nuclear “dust.”
By contrast, the Iranian account sounds completely different. The report by Republic World quotes Masoud Pezeshkian, president of Iran, saying the ceasefire was not a capitulation but borne of the sacrifice of the nation.
In addition, Iran has announced its own ten-point plan for any permanent settlement, which calls for all sanctions to be lifted, reparation and the return of frozen assets. According to Zero Hedge, the two sides are due to meet in Islamabad on Friday.
One of the conditions of the ceasefire was that Iran would again open the Strait of Hormuz, a chokepoint through which approximately 20% of the world’s natural gas shipments are transported. This, however, began to prove complicated almost straightaway: Iran declared that it would be applying tolls to all oil tankers navigating the long-standing waterway in cryptocurrency, asserting that it alone had the final say as to which ships were allowed through.