Ammon News - President Trump has been briefed on options for a return to all-out war with Iran but has chosen, for now, to stick with diplomatic talks, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing US officials familiar with the discussions.

Trump has held multiple recent conversations with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Dan Caine about whether to abandon negotiations and resume full-scale strikes, an option some officials describe internally as finishing the job. While he has not made a final decision, Trump has told aides he believes another round of large-scale attacks could derail diplomacy and undermine Washington's longer-term goal of dismantling Iran's nuclear program.

Trump has also told aides he is comfortable letting negotiations run past an August 18 deadline for a nuclear deal, giving talks more room to play out. In the meantime, he remains satisfied with ordering one-off retaliatory strikes when Iran violates the memorandum of understanding, the kind of exchange that flared into weekend fighting and strained the fragile ceasefire reached two weeks earlier.

Iran's envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner arrived in Doha this week for a fresh round of talks, though discussions are running through mediators rather than direct contact with their Iranian counterparts, according to Qatari officials, with technical-level talks also set to continue indirectly. A central sticking point remains Iran's push to charge billions of dollars in service fees for ships transiting the Strait of Hormuz, which the US insists should remain free to transit as it was before the war. Iran has also resisted accepting severe restrictions on its nuclear programme, despite Trump's public insistence that such a commitment has already been made. Energy Secretary Chris Wright said Tuesday that Iran has not been cooperative, crediting the US military's escort presence as the reason global oil supplies are recovering, and said Washington would keep energy flowing through the strait with or without Tehran's help.

To help manage tensions, the US has established a crisis communication channel between the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and Central Command, which a White House official described as already active and in use by both sides, even as other officials cautioned the effort remains in its early stages.

The latest deliberations reflect a president still searching for ways to break the deadlock without restarting a war that, by some officials' admission, would amount to a tacit acknowledgment that the high-profile Iran deal had failed. Over the course of Operation Epic Fury, which began February 28, US forces struck more than 13,000 targets across Iran before Trump agreed to an initial ceasefire on April 7. He has since repeatedly pulled back from authorising large-scale operations, including threatened strikes on Iranian civilization and the Kharg Island oil-export hub, and has said he would only restart full-scale war if Iran killed US troops.

Brookings Institution Iran expert Suzanne Maloney said Trump retains other tools short of war, including slow-walking access to billions of dollars in frozen Iranian funds or continuing to raise the cost of Iran's efforts to control the strait, though she cautioned that such a middle-ground strategy has real limitations given Iran's continued ability to disrupt traffic through the waterway.