Good evening once again. I am Stephanie Ruhl and welcome to the midweek nightcap. As the war with Iran seems nowhere near an end, the nation is tightening its grip on the straight-of-hormoos. Surprise, surprise. Today, Iran fired on three separate ships in the waterway and seized two of them.

This is while the U.S. is still locating Iranian ports.

The attack on these ships adds even more uncertainty to the situation, especially considering Donald Trump declared that he would extend the ceasefire yesterday.

Trump is already back to one of his previous talking points, teasing that a new round of peace talks with Iran could begin as soon as Friday, though there seems to be no other evidence to show that those talks are imminent or even a possibility.

So it seems like the U.S. and Iran are now in a standoff again as Pakistan, along with the rest of the world, is pushing for some kind of resolution

to this conflict that has now caused a global energy crisis and rattled the world's economy.

We'll get a lot to cover tonight.

So let's get started and bring in our nightcap.

David Rhodes here, MS Now Senior National Security Reporter, Ron Insana, veteran financial journalist

and publisher of the message of the markets on Substack, John Avalon veteran financial journalist and publisher of the message

of the markets on substack, John Avalon, journalist, and host of the bulwark podcast that

seriously you should listen to How to Fix It with John Avalon and my dear friend, Eddie Glog,

Princeton, Professor and MS Now contributor. David, you know we're going to first. Clearly,

the president wants to restart peace talks again.

You know, every investor that I speak to is like, yeah, the president wants out. He wants out. He wants out.

He might want out. But it seems like Iran is saying take a hike. Like, how do these Iranian attacks on these ships change that situation?

The show that the Iranians are saying take a hike.

I mean, the president, he keeps changing his message. One of his messages is that the

problem is that the Iranians are so divided. So I asked Vallainosser, he's a leading expert on

Iran. Do you think the Iranian regime is divided? Is it the fault? And he told me, I think

they are divided on whether to trust Donald Trump or not. One group says Islamabad is a waste of time,

and Trump is not serious. Another group says it could yield results. So his changing rhetoric,

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