Saudi Arabia’s crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), has reportedly been pushing for the US to continue the war against Iran despite President Trump’s claims that peace talks with the Islamic Republic have been “productive”.
The president is said to have held multiple calls with MBS in the past week to discuss the conflict, per the New York Times.
The crown prince is believed to fear that, were the war to end, Iran would become a failed state and could still pose a long-term threat in the region.
He reportedly advocated for Trump to follow through on his threat to strike Iranian power plants and even for US boots on the ground to help topple the regime.
Saudi Arabia and Iran have long had an adversarial relationship, which has been at a low since 2014, given their proxy involvement on opposite sides of the Yemeni Civil War.
However, Trump has suggested this week that peace talks between Washington and Tehran are close to yielding results.
On Monday, he called off his threat of US strikes on Iranian energy infrastructure, withdrawing an ultimatum he issued over the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, which Iran has subsequently agreed to reopen to “non-hostile” vessels in return for sanctions relief on oil shipments.
Trump subsequently claimed that his team was holding discussions with "the most respected" leader in Iran, which had yielded "major points of agreement" on "almost all points".
Channel 12's Amit Segal has since reported that this was a reference to Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the speaker of Iran's parliament, and not Mojtaba Khamenei, who replaced his father as the country's supreme leader but has not been seen since the start of the war.
Ghalibaf and Iran's foreign ministry have denied that any such negotiations took place, accusing the president of trying to "manipulate" financial markets with "fake news" after the war prompted a spike in oil prices and instability on stock markets.
Nonetheless, Trump claimed that Tehran has agreed to halt its programme of uranium enrichment, to rule out the prospect of developing a nuclear bomb and to hand over its stockpile of 60 per cent enriched material.
Yet Washington has still confirmed the deployment of extra troops to the region, leaving open the possibility of American boots on the ground.
Around 3,000 troops from the 82nd Airborne Division have been dispatched to support between 3,000 and 5,000 marines already deployed from the Pacific.
In total, more than 50,000 troops have been stationed under the Central Command (Centcom) in the region.
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