By Finian Cunningham

May 19, 2019 "Information Clearing House" -  -President Trump this week took a surprising turn by emphatically insisting that the US does not want war with Iran, dialing back mounting global fears that the two nations were on the cusp of all-out conflict.

Trump also in the same vein called for the Iranian leadership to enter into diplomatic negotiations.

The latest move by the US president appears to be a stark rebuke to his national security adviser John Bolton, who only last week had threatened Tehran with “unrelenting force” over vague intelligence claims that Iran was about to attack American interests in the Middle East. Bolton had announced the dispatch of an aircraft carrier strike group and nuclear-capable B-52 bombers to the Persian Gulf in a show of muscle-flexing towards Iran.

With subsequent incidents of alleged sabotage against oil tankers in the Gulf as well as Saudi claims of Iran directing drone attacks from Yemen on its petroleum plants, the situation looked like a powder keg ready to explode.

In stepped Donald Trump who reportedly admonished Bolton and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to tamp down talk of war and regime change in Tehran. Bolton and Pompeo are the most hawkish members of the White House cabinet, who in the recent past have urged air strikes on Iran and vilified the Iranian leadership as a “corrupt dictatorship”.

A prefiguring of Trump’s belated softening of White House tone was seen with Pompeo’s visit to Russia this week. During his meetings with President Vladimir Putin and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, the American diplomat assured that “the US is not fundamentally seeking a war with Iran”.

That assurance is a bit hard to take from Pompeo given the relentless hostility from the Trump administration over past year from when the White House scrapped its participation in the 2015 internationally agreed nuclear accord with Iran. The administration has since re-imposed harsh economic sanctions on Tehran with the belligerently stated aim to “reduce Iranian oil exports to zero”.