The calls not to attack Iran are a set of diplomatic approaches to Donald Trump that John Kiriakou described on air on 30 January 2026, when asked whether an American strike on Iran was likely within the week.
Where the information came from
Kiriakou prefaced the report with an unusual account of his own sourcing. In the preceding three or four weeks he had, he said, developed friendships in three Middle Eastern royal families — thanks to podcasts — and had been in close touch with the princes concerned. He was careful to characterise them: “they’re well-placed princes. They’re not just, you know, playboy princes living in Beverly Hills and driving Lamborghinis. These are serious people.”[1]
The Arab calls
What he had learned the previous day was that the Saudis, the Jordanians, the Egyptians and the Emiratis had all gone to the president by phone and asked him not to attack Iran.[2]
The Egyptians went furthest. They told him, in Kiriakou’s account, that a strike would lead almost immediately to a region-wide war — which is the last thing that anybody wants.[2] Kiriakou said he agreed with the analysis, and Rall added that the proxies would be triggered.[2]
The Israeli call
The detail Kiriakou treated as more important was that the Israelis had gone to the president the same day with the same request — do not attack Iran.[2]
He was explicit that this was not a change of heart: “Not out of the goodness of their hearts that they’ve had some kind of change of uh change of position, but because they have not been able to replace all of the Iron Dome missiles that they used in the last go-round with Iran.”[3]
The armada
On the president’s own announcement that he was sending an armada off the coast of Iran, Kiriakou — who follows Iran news closely — was dismissive of the arithmetic: it is one carrier battle group, and it is definitely not an armada. It was tough talk, and tough talk is very much the way Donald Trump does these things.[4]
He then went out on a limb. Trump had shocked everyone in his first term by talking tough and then meeting Kim Jong-un and defusing the confrontation. If the Middle Eastern countries were unanimous in their opposition and the region was on the brink, this might be the moment for the same manoeuvre — using the Omanis, for example, to go to the Iranians and propose serious talks, something that has been done before. His reading of the motive was blunt: “President Trump wants a real Nobel Prize.”[5]