After months of predicting a nuclear deal with Iran was just around the corner, President Donald Trump appears to be testing whether military pressure can accomplish what diplomacy alone has not.

The strategy was on full display over the past 24 hours. Trump followed through on his threat to strike Iran again overnight, launching a barrage of Tomahawk missiles and fighter jet attacks against Iranian targets while warning that additional bombing would follow unless Iran agreed to a deal. Hours later, however, he announced he had canceled planned strikes for Thursday evening, saying negotiations had been elevated to the highest levels of Iran’s leadership and that the parties had approved the final contours of an agreement.

The rapid sequence of threats, strikes and renewed diplomacy highlights an increasingly familiar pattern in Trump’s approach to Iran: using military pressure to push negotiations forward while keeping a diplomatic off-ramp open. The question is whether the strategy is increasing Washington’s leverage — or reinforcing Iran’s belief that the United States ultimately wants a deal more than continued confrontation.

«He has made so many threats that he has not carried through on and telegraphed on many occasions his strong desire to end this war as soon as possible, that I think Iran does not take these threats seriously,» Michael Eisenstadt, director of the Military and Security Studies Program at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, told Fox News Digital.

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Trump said Iranian officials contacted him during the strikes and asked for the bombing to stop. 

«If they don’t sign the deal, we’ll bomb the sh*t out of them tomorrow night,» he said.

Trump suggested Thursday the campaign could eventually expand to Iran’s energy infrastructure, including Kharg Island, the country’s most important oil export hub.

«At some point in the not too distant future, we will be taking Kharg Island, and other oil infrastructure points, and assume total control of their Oil and Gas Markets, much like we have with Venezuela.» 

But later, he sounded less certain. «My preference has always been to take Kharg Island. I don’t know that America has the stomach for it, to be honest,» Trump said on Fox and Friends. 

Yet even as he promised additional military action, Trump maintained that negotiations had been on the verge of success.

«We’ll see what happens with the deal. We were really close to a deal,» he said earlier Wednesday.

The comments marked a sharp escalation from a president who only days earlier predicted an agreement could arrive within «two or three days» and has repeatedly suggested a breakthrough remains imminent despite months of unresolved disputes over uranium enrichment, sanctions relief and Iran’s nuclear stockpile.

«They keep tapping us along,» Trump told reporters Wednesday. «They keep playing us for suckers because you know what? They dealt with some very stupid presidents.»

Trump’s latest actions suggest the administration is still offering Tehran an off-ramp through a negotiated nuclear agreement. The question is whether military pressure strengthens Washington’s hand — or whether Iran has concluded it can withstand the costs and outlast the campaign.

Iran «has more resilience,» said James Robbins, dean of academics at the Institute of World Politics, noting that Iran has been forced to work around global isolation for decades. «They’re kind of used to sanctions. They’re used to economic dislocations, much more so than Americans.»

Plumes of smoke rise following reported explosions in Tehran, Iran, on March 2, 2026. (Sohrab/Middle East Images/AFP via Getty Images)

Behnam Taleblu, senior director of the Iran Program at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, argued that mounting pressure does not necessarily make the regime more willing to compromise.

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«The more desperate the regime becomes, the more aggressive the regime becomes,» Taleblu told Fox News Digital.

He also questioned whether strikes on bridges, power plants and other infrastructure would fundamentally alter Iran’s decision-making, arguing that the regime is primarily concerned with threats to its own hold on power.

«Until those making the key national security decisions, those enforcing the key national security decisions, and those enforcing the regime’s longest war, which is on its own people, so long as those three are not targeted, we’ll be back where we started,» he said.

Eisenstadt argued that Iran may ultimately believe it can absorb sanctions, withstand military pressure and simply wait for political pressures inside the U.S. to grow.

«I think they believe that time is on their side, given domestic criticism of the war and its economic impacts in the United States,» he said.

Trump’s lates strike threats came days after an Iranian drone brought down a U.S. Apache helicopter operating near the Strait of Hormuz, triggering retaliatory U.S. strikes on Iranian radar and air-defense sites and threatening to unravel an already fragile ceasefire.

The administration’s goal has long been that sustained military and economic pressure would eventually force Iran to make concessions that months of negotiations alone have failed to produce. Trump and his advisors have repeatedly argued that sanctions, military operations and the U.S.-led blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, which has cut off the pathway for roughly 80% of Iran’s oil exports, have left Iran increasingly isolated and economically vulnerable.

Iranian officials publicly rejected the notion that expanding the target set would force Iran to bend.

Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian called Trump’s threat to strike power plants and transportation infrastructure a «sign of desperation.»

A drone view shows vessels anchored at the Strait of Hormuz, as seen from Musandam, Oman, May 25, 2026. (Stringer TPX IMAGES OF THE DAY via Reuters)

«Critical infrastructures are the lifeblood of the people,» Pezeshkian said in a post on X.

Trump has repeatedly rejected the notion that Iran can wait out his administration.

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«They thought they were going to out-wait me, you know. ‘We’ll out-wait him. He’s got the midterms.’ I don’t care about the midterms,» Trump said during a Cabinet meeting on May 27.

Despite Trump’s repeated assertions that a deal is near, negotiators remain divided over several core issues, including uranium enrichment, sanctions relief and the future of Iran’s stockpile of highly enriched uranium. Iranian officials have acknowledged progress on some elements of a potential agreement while warning that significant obstacles remain.

Whether the latest round of strikes changes Iran’s calculations may determine whether Trump’s strategy of military pressure succeeds in producing the agreement he insists remains within reach.

El Papa, en un homenaje a los migrantes muertos en su intento por llegar a Europa, en el puerto Arguineguin, en Gran Canaria. Foto: REUTERS

Testimonios de huidas y rescates

El Papa participó de un homenaje con una ofrenda floral a los migrantes desaparecidos en el mar. Foto: REUTERS

Pope Leo XIV landed in Spain’s Canary Islands, an epicenter for incoming migrants seeking entry into Europe, on Thursday just days after criticizing the country’s immigration policies in a speech to Spain’s Parliament.

Pope Leo will meet with 1,000 migrants on Friday to cap off his apostolic journey to Spain, the European country with the sixth largest Christian population on the continent.

Following his parliamentary speech Monday in which he took aim at Europe’s immigration polices, Pope Leo landed Thursday on the island chain’s Gran Canaria, according to Reuters.

On Thursday he met with migrants and leaders of international organizations that assist migrants, holding a moment of silence for migrants who died trying to reach Gran Canaria at Port of Arguineguin, a dock which made headlines in 2020 after over 1,000 migrants ended up stranded there during the Covid-19 pandemic.

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Relief organizations came to call the Port of Arguineguin the «Dock of Shame» after the migrant crisis, a theme Pope Leo seemed to pick up on while speaking at the port Thursday.

«Dear migrants, before saying anything else to you, I want to bow before your dignity,» the pope said. «You are not just numbers or files. You are people who have left behind families and homes. You have dreams that no one has the right to despise,» Pope Leo said at the dock.

«We cannot grow accustomed to counting the dead,» he added.

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He also called for «legal and safe pathways» for immigration worldwide.

Pope Leo XIV on the day of a meeting with organizations working with migrants at the Port of Arguineguin, during his apostolic journey on the island of Gran Canaria, Spain June 11, 2026. (REUTERS/Borja Suarez)

Located less than 100 miles off the coast of West Africa, Gran Canaria has been the destination for thousands of Africans, many of whom have lost their lives attempting to traverse the volatile waters in small boats.

Over 3,000 people died trying to make the journey in 2025 alone, according to the non-governmental organization (NGO) Caminando Fronteras.

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The Canaries have seen a massive uptick in migrant entries since 2015. In 2024 the archipelago broke records with 46,843 irregular migrants compared to under 1,000 in 2015, according to Reuters.

Speaking to media at Pope Leo’s event, a boat captain who assists charities and NGOs in ferrying migrants said he had personally helped save over 20,000 migrants in the last 18 years, Reuters reported.

«It’s a number that makes me sick and that you cannot forget,» the captain, Tito Villarmea, told Reuters. «I wish we ​didn’t have to save anyone,» he continued.

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Pope Leo XIV makes a floral offering to migrants lost at sea at the dock of the Port of Arguineguin in Gran Canaria, Spain, June 11, 2026. (Simone Risoluti/Vatican Media/­Handout via REUTERS)

Under Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, Spain’s socialist government has liberalized the country’s policies on migration, approving a plan in April to grant 500,000 undocumented migrants legal status.

Spain’s conservative lawmakers, meanwhile, fired back after Pope Leo’s Monday speech to Parliament.

During his address to lawmakers, Pope Leo called migration a «tragic drama» and said discrimination against people based on «national, ethnic, religious or linguistic origin, or because of their economic or social status» was a violation of the «universal principle of the equal dignity of all human beings.»

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But Santiago Abascal, who heads Spain’s conservative Vox party, countered making a point that Vatican City has policies against illegal immigration as well.

«I like the Vatican state’s migration policy. If someone enters illegally or with violence, they are fined, imprisoned and banned from entry. I would like a similar migration policy for Spain,» Abascal told reporters Monday.