Trump Calls Iran War 'Small Potatoes' but Renews Pickaxe Mountain Threat
The president downplayed a war entering its seventh month — “It’s not a big thing… In Venezuela, we lost nobody. In this, we lost 18 people” — endorsing his vice-president’s “I wouldn’t call it a war” framing while insisting “We control the Hormuz Strait. We control it very strongly.” Yet he repeated his threat to strike Pickaxe Mountain, the fortified site near Natanz, “very soon”. Iran’s air defence commander answered overnight: the country is “ready for any kind of confrontation” because “the threat is not over”.
The rebranding campaign — from “large and powerful” strikes to “small potatoes” in seventy-two hours — tracks the polling more faithfully than the battlefield: six in ten Americans disapprove, petrol is up nearly a dollar in a year, and a war shrunk to “intermittent strikes” is easier to carry into the midterms than one with a name. The Pickaxe Mountain threat cuts against the minimising, though: the buried enrichment complex near Natanz is precisely the target whose destruction could not be called small, and pairing the threat with the shrug keeps Tehran guessing which president will show up next week. The independent shipping data telling against “we control it very strongly” — seven transits a day against a pre-war hundred — remains the war’s quietest inconvenient fact. Watch whether “very soon” survives the weekend’s Moscow diplomacy; the two theatres are now openly linked.