U.S. Looks to Maintain Pressure on Iran as Tensions Cool by Dion Nissenbaum, Benoit Faucon and Felicia Schwartz - Wall Street Journal
With open hostilities between Iran and the U.S. subsiding for now, the Trump administration is seeking to keep pressure on Iran without pushing the region into a volatile new confrontation, U.S. and regional officials said.
U.S. officials said they are increasingly confident Iran and its Mideast allies are looking to avoid a head-on fight with America, even as Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, delivered a firebrand message during prayers on Friday in Tehran.
Key members of President Trump’s national-security team view Tehran as weakened by the confrontation and struggling to regain its footing domestically after its military mistakenly shot down a commercial airliner in Iran, triggering days of protests across the country following its admission of the missile strike that killed 176 people…