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Hello, welcome to the programme. This is News Hour from the BBC World Service coming live from London. My name's Paul Henley.

With uncertainty continuing to surround the status of the war in the Middle East,

and there'll be more on that very soon, the BBC's North America editor Sarah Smith

has been speaking to President Donald Trump in a short phone call today.

Their conversations spanned Iran, the British King's visit to the US,

and the UK Prime Minister Kirstama.

I asked Sarah what had been said.

He was making a rather optimistic case for how the war on Iran is going.

He said to me that the other side, meaning Iran, is dying to do a deal.

So whatever I'm saying, whatever I'm doing, it seems to be working very well.

Now, there's actually not much evidence that Iran is

ready to try and do a deal, but it's not unusual for Donald Trump to be quite bombastic in the

things he says about how the war is going with Iran. He frequently claims on social media that he's

already achieved a great victory over Iran, whereas, as we know, we're in fact in a period of an extended

ceasefire. But, yeah, he is clearly feeling good about how it's going when he says that

it seems to be working very well. The conversation turned to specifically British things,

for example. So I asked him about Sir Keustomer, whom he has been very, very critical of in recent weeks.

He says he feels very disappointed that the United Kingdom didn't offer more assistance with the war in Iran.

He's disappointed in all NATO allies, but he singles out the UK for particular criticism.

So I asked him why he felt he needed help from NATO allies, given how proud he is of how the

American and Israeli militaries have conducted the war on Iran. He said he didn't actually need any

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