Chief Justice John Roberts just keeps on breaking conservatives’ hearts.

On two consecutive days this week, Roberts sided with the court’s liberal wing to deliver 5-4 rulings that deeply disappointed right-leaning lawyers and pundits who had been counting on near-certain victory from a court now stocked with a pair of Trump-appointed justices hand-picked by conservative legal activists.

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On Thursday, Roberts stunned many courtwatchers by invalidating a Trump administration decision to add a question on citizenship to the 2020 census.

Adding to the sting was the fact that the chief justice wasn’t just along for the ride on the closely-watched ruling: He penned the majority opinion, which essentially accused Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross of lying about his reasons for seeking to add the query on citizenship.

“Altogether, the evidence tells a story that does not match the explanation the Secretary gave for his decision,” Roberts wrote, backed by the court’s four liberals. He goes on to rip the government’s claims in the case as apparently “contrived” and “a distraction.”

A day earlier, Roberts was the sole GOP appointee to side with the liberal wing in a case many legal conservatives were hoping would deal a major blow to the much-loathed administrative state by overturning decades of precedent allowing federal agencies wide leeway to interpret their own regulations.

Among some conservatives close to Trump the sense of anger and betrayal was palpable, with some on the right suffering painful flashbacks to Roberts’ 2012 decision to join with the court’s Democratic appointees and uphold Obamacare’s individual mandate even as all of his Republican-appointed colleagues dissented. The anger seemed especially acute with possible abortion-related cases on the horizon for the next term.

“I’m for impeaching the Chief Justice for lying to all of us about his support of the Constitution. He is responsible for Robertscare and now he is angling for vast numbers of illegal residents to help Dems hold Congress. Enough Deception from GOP judges on the Constitution,” American Conservative Union chairman Matt Schlapp tweeted shortly after the Thursday ruling.

“I want to Impeach Roberts and Trump would get another pick. Sounds good to me,”’ Schlapp added. “Chief Justice John Roberts ‘fixed’ Obamacare and now he found an I significant [sic] excuse to allow those here illegally to help Dems keep the house majority. He lied to all of us and under oath in the Senate. It’s perfectly legal to ask citizenship ? on census.”

Former White House aide Sebastian Gorka also weighed in to express his disgust. “Chief Justice Roberts of the #SCOTUS betrays the US Constitution again,” Gorka said on Twitter.

Conservative pundit and former GOP Senate candidate Dan Bongino echoed recurring conservative complaints that Roberts is looking to curry favor on the Washington dinner party circuit.

“John Roberts is terrified of the liberal op-ed columnists. They know they hold him captive. They can easily sway his opinions by issuing their ‘warnings’ to him through their columns,” Bongino wrote. “He’s not a judge anymore, he’s a politician.”

Not all conservatives were up in arms about Roberts’ perceived defection Thursday on the census case.

Former Reagan White House lawyer and radio host Hugh Hewitt noted that on the same day the census case came down, Roberts joined with the court’s conservatives in a 5-4 decision that decisively rejected any role for courts in remedying political gerrymandering. The chief justice also took the pen for the majority in that fight, flatly dismissing the idea of courts resolving such disputes.

Hewitt declared the gerrymandering decision to be far more consequential.

“Conservatives coiled to condemn Chief Justice over citizenship question need to focus on this incredibly important, far reaching and absolutely correct decision,” Hewitt tweeted. “Would anyone preferring that #SCOTUS clearly uphold census question and at same time continue the decades of absurd ambiguity about the clearly-delegated-to-political-bodies re-districting power please raise their hands? I know you’d like both, but if you had to choose either?”

There is a degree of selective outrage at Roberts. Trump’s newest nominee to the court, Justice Neil Gorsuch, sided with liberals in a series of 5-4, late-term decisions this year, but they were less high-profile. As Gorsuch ruled in favor of criminal defendants—including a child pornography convict—in a pair of cases related to sentencing, there was no outcry from the right that Trump’s pick was abandoning his backers.

Still, Roberts’ tendency to side with liberals in some cases embraced by many Republican activists seems to grate on many conservative lawyers, including some who helped lead the fight to confirm him.

“I still haven’t fully psychologically accepted the truth about Roberts,” said Curt Levey of the Committee for Justice in an interview.

“He may in his heart think he’s a conservative, but he’s not going to be what conservatives want and liberals fear….With each passing year—maybe this doesn’t happen every year, but we’ve seen enough of it, we kind of have to accept he’s roughly another Kennedy,” Levey said, referring to Justice Anthony Kennedy, the Reagan appointee who dismayed conservatives by upholding abortion rights and leading the court to declare a constitutional right to same-sex marriage.

Levey said the political polarization in the country may be prodding Roberts to go further than he otherwise would in trying to ensure that the court is viewed as moderate and not being buffeted by the political winds. Last November, when President Donald Trump made derisive comments about “Obama judges,” Roberts shot back with a statement declaring “We do not have Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges. . . What we have is an extraordinary group of dedicated judges doing their level best to do equal right to those appearing before them.”

“At the end of the day, Roberts wants the court to be well respected,” Levey said, calling the chief justice “a compromiser and people pleaser.”

“I think the hysteria on the left about an ‘arch conservative’ court is having an effect,” the legal activist said. “At the end of the day, [Roberts] wants the court to be well respected and a highly divided nation is a threat to the legitimacy of the court because with every decision the half the public is convinced the court is acting for political reasons.”

Democrats broke into open warfare Thursday over Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s surrender to the Senate’s emergency border aid package, with the caucus’s long-simmering divide between progressives and centrists playing out in dramatic fashion on the House floor.

Some lawmakers even resorted to public name-calling, with progressive leader Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Wis.) accusing moderate Democrats of favoring child abuse — an exchange on Twitter that prompted a pair of freshmen centrists to confront him directly on the floor, with other lawmakers looking on in shock.

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Pelosi has spent months deftly navigating a diverse caucus brimming with political novices, deeply split on ideological lines and itching to throw the president out of office. But this week’s fiasco exposed fissures in Pelosi’s rank-and-file, in her leadership and in her relationship with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.).

“She is a very experienced legislator, but I think this is a very rough patch,” said Rep. Pramila Jayapal, co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus.

“We can’t say that we have a lawless administration or a president who should be in prison, or whatever people want to say about him, but then cave,” she added. “You have to fight for what you believe.”

And the conclusion of the four-day whiplash battle within the caucus proved Pelosi, who often describes herself as a “master negotiator,” is not invincible. The battle further illustrates the hurdles Pelosi faces in the fall as she tries to keep her caucus united while negotiating with Republicans to avoid a fiscal cliff and debt default.

Just before the vote, Pocan, the co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, inflamed tensions further when he called the Problem Solvers Caucus — a bipartisan group of moderates that pushed Pelosi to take up the Senate bill — the “Child Abuse Caucus.”

The stinging attack was a reference to the Senate bill’s lack of additional language to protect migrant children that House progressives had fought aggressively for.

“Since when did the Problem Solvers Caucus become the Child Abuse Caucus?” Pocan wrote on Twitter.

Reps. Max Rose (D-N.Y.), and Dean Phillips (D-Minn.), both members of the Problem Solvers Caucus, confronted Pocan on the House floor over his tweet. According to sources familiar with the conversation, Rose used expletives, and Pocan said he did not apologize.

“I said, how come you can’t stay 24 hours to do your job?” Pocan said of his retort to Rose on the floor. “He said, ‘My mother thinks I’m a child abuser.’ I said, ‘I’ll tell your mother you’re not a child abuser.’”

Rose, whom his party considers to be vulnerable in 2020, vented his frustration Thursday shortly after the exchange, calling Pocan’s tweet “crazy, crazy language.”

“Mark’s tweet just speaks to why everyone hates this place. He’s just trying to get retweets. That’s all he cares about,” Rose told POLITICO.

Their spat continued on Twitter, with Pocan responding: “Maybe the REAL problem is someone who thinks this is about retweets and not about bad contractors, awful conditions and kids.”

More than 90 Democrats voted against the Senate bill, including members of leadership like Reps. Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.), Ben Ray Lujan (D-N.M.) and David Cicilline (D-R.I.) — a sign of the deep discontent simmering within the caucus. In a shocking move, Pelosi’s entire team of negotiators on the border aid bill, including House Appropriations Committee Chairwoman Nita Lowey (D-N.Y.) and Reps. Lucille Roybal-Allard (D-Calif.) and Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) also voted no.

Progressives, including Pocan, said they felt stung by the stunning course-reversal by Pelosi, where she swiftly bowed to pressure from moderates who had threatened to tank the House version of the bill — which contained hard-fought wins for the liberal Democrats. And Pocan warned that it could fire up the 90-member Congressional Progressive Caucus to take more hardline stances on key bills in the coming months.

“I just think it’s hard to ask our caucus to help deliver votes to pass things,” Pocan said. “It’s just going to be a lot harder for us to care to help deliver votes.”

Multiple other liberal Democrats were also publicly seething at their centrist colleagues for forcing Pelosi to abandon her initial plan to vote on an amended version of the Senate bill that contained additional protections for migrant children.

House centrists, meanwhile, took a victory lap for their earlier efforts to pressure Pelosi into taking up the Senate bill.

“You have to understand, you’re not going to get everything you want,” Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-N.J.), co-chair of the Problem Solvers Caucus, said in an interview after the bill passed. “We just wanted to make sure that none of us went home without getting something done for children and families at the border.”

Hours earlier, Gottheimer and other Democratic moderates began privately lobbying their colleagues to threaten to oppose their own caucus’s version of the border bill, arguing that Pelosi should simply take up the Senate version. Those members, who belonged to both the Problem Solvers Caucus and the Blue Dog Coalition, ultimately totaled 18 — enough to tank the bill.

Pelosi went back to the negotiating table, speaking with Vice President Mike Pence for an hour before huddling with her leadership team. Pence agreed to some “administrative fixes” that addressed some Democratic concerns — and Pelosi announced her House would vote on the clean Senate bill as a result — but it wasn’t enough to calm furious liberals.

“I think the Problem Solvers Caucus is emerging to be this tea party within our own Democratic Party,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) told POLITICO. “I find their tactics to be extremely concerning. It’s horrifying. It’s horrifying.”

The New York Democrat said she blames the centrist group for the House getting stuck with the Senate’s funding package.

But other members of the Problem Solvers Caucus, who pride themselves on being bipartisan and largely staying out of the headlines, were privately livid.

Facing an uprising from both the right and left wings of the caucus, Pelosi struggled to contain members’ outrage on Thursday over being forced to concede to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who refused to entertain Democratic demands that he amend the Senate bill.

The end result also left House Democrats fuming at Schumer and Senate Democrats, who voted overwhelmingly for the Senate’s border aid package, weakening the House majority’s negotiating position, they said.

“It obviously significantly undermined our leverage and our ability to keep these important protections in the bill,” said Rep. David Cicilline (D-R.I.), a member of House leadership who voted against the bill Thursday.

Pelosi expressed her own unhappiness with Schumer at a Democratic leadership meeting Thursday, complaining that he couldn’t corral his members to support the House bill, according to a source in the room.

Progressive lawmakers were much sharper — and public — in their criticism. Jayapal said Senate Democrats should have grown a “spine” and not voted with Senate Republicans on Wednesday.

Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), a progressive firebrand, declined to fault House leaders, placing the blame instead squarely on the shoulders of Senate Democrats, most of whom backed the Senate bill.

“Let’s focus on the fact that Senate Democrats joined the leadership behind McConnell in support of something that had no safeguards, no basic human rights for these children,” she said. “What are you doing? You’re just throwing money and saying, ‘continue what you’re doing President Trump, you’re doing a fine job.’”

Senate Democratic sources privately blamed House Democrats, saying they pulled out of bipartisan border aid negotiations in May after the Congressional Hispanic Caucus objected. Some House Democrats also privately blamed Jayapal, who they say inflamed the CHC, urging them to pressure leadership to pull out of the negotiations in May. Others argued that some of the demands from both progressives and Hispanic members came too late in negotiations.

That resulted in the Senate moving forward on its own, with the Senate Appropriations Committee approving its bipartisan package 30-1 before it overwhelmingly passed on the floor.

“Senate Democrats were with the House Dems all the way, but their bill couldn’t pass the Senate,” said a senior Senate Democratic aide. “By refusing to participate in a four-corner negotiation for weeks, House Dems never allowed themselves the chance to have a say in a bill that could actually become law, so they only have themselves to blame for that.”

House Democratic leaders sought to tamp down the controversy but acknowledged they weren’t able to get the job done, refusing to blame their Senate colleagues.

“It’s done. It’s not time for blame,” Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) said. “We would have hoped that we would have had the opportunity to get the vision that we think should have been supported by the Senate. We were disappointed we weren’t able to get that in there.”

John Bresnahan, Jake Sherman, Melanie Zanona and Laura Barrón-López contributed to this report.

The Supreme Court’s ruling Thursday that federal courts have no business deciding how much partisan gerrymandering is too much didn’t end the fight over how politicians draw political lines — it just moved the battlefield.

Democrats and reformers wanted the high court to set standards for when politically-motivated map-making goes too far. Instead, justices accelerated the race between the two parties to tilt the system to their advantage by electing as many governors and legislators as possible or, in some states, getting voters to support ballot measures to take the redistricting process out of politicians’ hands by 2021.

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That’s when states will redraw their maps to conform to the 2020 census — now, without a worry that federal courts will throw them out for being excessively partisan.

But this is hardly the end of the story.

While the justices closed off filing legal challenges to gerrymandering in federal courts, they explicitly said those lawsuits are still fair game in state courts. It was there that Democratic-aligned plaintiffs successfully demolished Pennsylvania’s GOP-drawn congressional map before the 2018 elections.

“We’ll be fighting in the states to ensure that we have a fair redistricting process,” said Eric Holder, the former attorney general, who is now the chair of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee. “We will use the state courts where we are no longer able to use the federal courts.”

That means the high court’s ruling not only raises the stakes for legislative elections, it also heightens the importance of securing liberal or conservative majorities on state high courts, whether they are appointed by governors or directly elected by voters. Because the U.S. Supreme Court has a limited role in overseeing how state supreme courts interpret state laws, those state judges could become the final authority determining which maps stand or fall after the next round of nationwide redistricting.

The new importance of state courts will be on full display next month in North Carolina, where Democratic-linked plaintiffs allege GOP state legislators violated state law in drawing the congressional map. While the Supreme Court’s decision Thursday preserved North Carolina’s GOP-drawn congressional map, Democrats can now take a similar case to the state Supreme Court. Six of the seven justices on that court ran as Democrats.

“We believe that this is a fruitful avenue,” said Kathay Feng, the national redistricting director at Common Cause, the good-government group that brought the North Carolina litigation to overturn the map.

Republicans expect Democratic groups to pick up the strategy and unleash it across the country after the 2020 census, after their success in Pennsylvania and the attempt in North Carolina.

“It’s clear, and Democrats have already signaled this, that they’re going to be taking these cases to state courts,” said Jason Torchinsky, general counsel for the National Republican Redistricting Trust. “That opens a Pandora’s box at the state level. State judiciaries are going to have to wrestle with the same questions” that the Supreme Court just did, Torchinsky continued — except in dozens of courtrooms around the country with different judges and different provisions of state constitutions at play.

Republicans also plan to fight Democrats outside the courtroom, said Adam Kincaid, NRRT’s executive director. “The next phase of redistricting is going to be about [Democratic] groups doubling down on their attempts to flip state courts,” Kincaid said, noting that Republican groups had recently boosted a conservative judge to victory in a nationally watched Wisconsin court race.

While the Supreme Court says federal judges can’t police partisan gerrymandering, it doesn’t mean that all gerrymandering is constitutional. Roberts stressed that Thursday’s ruling does not make racial gerrymandering — using race or ethnicity to pack voters into districts — permissible, and federal courts will still police that issue.

But Paul Mitchell, the vice president of Political Data Inc., said he worried that — because the federal courts now can’t evaluate partisan gerrymandering claims — legislators who draw gerrymandered maps will cloak race-based mapmaking as actually motivated by party.

“We know partisanship can be used as a proxy for ethnicity, so this could provide the pretext for a type of racial gerrymandering where people say ‘Democrat’ instead of ‘Latino’ or ‘black,’ and ‘Republican’ instead of ‘white.’ And now, ‘Ok, you can gerrymander,’” said Mitchell.

Democrats say litigation is only one page in their playbook, however. Already, some states have independent redistricting commissions or other guardrails against extreme partisan gerrymandering — including a number that have adopted them in recent years.

As if to draw a roadmap, Chief Justice John Roberts cited a number of state-level reforms in his majority opinion. He mentioned Florida’s “Fair Districts” amendments to the state constitution, which state courts used to throw out that state’s congressional maps in 2015 after finding GOP lawmakers violated the amendment’s prohibitions against any political consideration in redistricting.

Roberts also cited amendments to state constitutions approved by voters in Colorado and Michigan in the 2018 midterms that created redistricting commissions. Voters in Ohio also approved a proposal earlier in 2018 to give the minority party in the legislature more power in the redistricting process moving forward.

Democrats want to expand the practice. Holder said his organization — which also has the explicit backing of former President Barack Obama — was exploring pushing changes to the redistricting process in Arkansas, New Hampshire and Oklahoma in 2020.

Moves toward independent commissions aren’t just coming from Democrats, however. Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, a second-term Republican, ran on redistricting reform and had urged the Supreme Court to strike down his state’s map, a Democratic gerrymander. After the court declined on Thursday, Hogan called the ruling “terribly disappointing” — but pledged to continue the fight for a nonpartisan commission to draw district lines.

“It is, and will continue to be, one of my highest priorities as governor,” said Hogan.

But some of those commissions may also be in peril at the high court. In 2014, justices ruled 5-4 that Arizona’s independent commission, which was approved by voters, did not violate the constitutional provision that state legislatures govern congressional elections. Then-Justice Anthony Kennedy joined the court’s liberal bloc to form the majority in that case, with Roberts writing a blistering dissent.

Kennedy was a moderate on redistricting cases — he suggested that gerrymandering could go too far but never was able to marshal a majority of justices to agree on a single standard. Since his replacement on the court by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, reformers have worried that the precedent set in Arizona could be at risk, with the new conservative majority ruling that only legislatures themselves can redraw congressional lines.

“It is something that gives me some degree of concern,” Holder said Thursday, adding that it would be “appalling” if the court overturned that decision.

Holder expressed some measure of optimism, however, noting that Roberts mentioned some of these voter-approved commissions in his majority opinion as evidence that the states can police themselves.

“It seems like there is an acceptance of the existence of these commissions,” said Holder.

OSAKA, Japan — President Donald Trump arrived at a gathering of world leaders Thursday searching for support for a new deal to curtail an increasingly aggressive Iran. He’s not likely to find any.

In the meantime, Iran has said it will soon violate limits set under the 2015 international nuclear agreement, angry at Trump for pulling out of the deal and slapping harsh sanctions on the country. The move threatens to kill the deal for good, leaving the global community without any comprehensive restrictions on Iran’s nuclear ambitions — let alone its funding of violent proxy groups in the region — even as Trump has long said he wants to pursue an expansive agreement that covers all of these activities.

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But the president is unlikely to find much help in Japan, where Trump is attending three days of meetings at the G-20 conference, a gathering of the world’s largest economies. Not only do other countries still support the 2015 deal, they’re also skeptical Trump can actually strike a better agreement, especially considering his approaching reelection campaign and the fact that Iran recently proclaimed the end of diplomacy with the U.S.

“The Iranians believe a gamble on Democrats winning the White House would be worth the risk of filibustering the Trump administration,” said Michael Rubin, a former Defense Department official who now serves as a resident scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. “In short, there’s a cost to us when there is no partisan solidarity on the foreign policy front.”

Trump abruptly canceled a retaliatory strike on Iran last week after it shot down an unmanned U.S. surveillance drone, opting instead for new sanctions against Iranian leaders. The sanctions were designed to pressure Iran to negotiate, but Iran’s fiery response shows they may make diplomacy more difficult — at least initially.

Iran Foreign Ministry spokesman Abbas Mousavi blasted the move as “fruitless,” insisting it would spell “the permanent closure of the road of diplomacy” between Tehran and Washington.

At the G-20 summit, Trump will meet with the leaders of three of the countries that signed on to the landmark 2015 agreement with Iran — Germany, China, Russia — as well as Crown Prince Mohammad Bin Salman of Saudi Arabia, one of Trump’s only allies for tougher action against Iran. The deal’s other signatories, Britain and France, will also have delegations there.

The Trump administration is portraying the conference as an opportunity for Trump to make his pitch in person.

“This is a chance for the president to engage with a number of different international leaders, among our closest partners and allies, to obtain their support and to have discussions about how we can encourage Iran to enter into negotiations and to respond to the president’s diplomacy with diplomacy, instead of terrorism and nuclear blackmail,” said one senior administration official.

But as Trump has discussed a potential new deal over the past two weeks, he has intensely focused on Iran’s possible pursuit of nuclear weapons, occasionally also mentioning the country’s funding of terrorist groups.

“I think they want to negotiate,” Trump said on “Meet the Press” Sunday. “And I think they want to make a deal. And my deal is nuclear.”

The language has surprised analysts and former officials, who say he’s signaling that he wants a deal that closely mirrors the 2015 agreement he spent years attacking. Trump has also said he would negotiate with Iran with no preconditions.

Trump’s recent rhetoric stands in contrast to his more hawkish aides, including Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and national security adviser John Bolton, who continue to focus on a list of 12 far-reaching demands for Iran that address nuclear weapons but also ballistic missiles and terrorism. Critics have said that Iran would have to change regimes to meet the demands.

“The U.S. internal views about a deal are split and that means getting to a consensus position for talks would be hard, especially if some in the [U.S. government] believe that the only deal worth having is one in which there is no Iranian nuclear program to speak of,” said Richard Nephew, a former sanctions expert at the State Department and National Security Council who helped negotiate the 2105 deal before moving to Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs.

Trump withdrew from the 2015 agreement — which gave Iran sanctions relief in exchange for the country curbing its nuclear program — in May 2018. Even without the U.S., though, the deal has remained intact, albeit in increasingly tenuous fashion.

Iran has said it could exceed the deal’s restrictions on stockpiles of low-enriched uranium as soon as Thursday. The country has also threatened to enrich its uranium beyond the limits in the deal, getting it closer to having the capability to make a nuclear weapon.

Adding tension to the situation were several attacks on oil tankers in the Gulf of Oman that the Trump administration has blamed on Iran.

Before he left Washington, Trump again criticized the agreement, noting some of the deal’s terms have expiration dates and arguing it doesn’t allow observers to visit certain non-nuclear facilities without requesting access and allowing a short delay.

“The deal was a horrible deal,” he told reporters at the White House. “It was no good. It was no good. … They would have had a clear path to a nuclear weapon. We’re not going to allow that to happen. You can’t do it.”

Still, U.S. allies remain firmly committed to the agreement. French President Emmanuel Macron, for example, would be willing to discuss another deal, but only if the initial pact stays in place, a senior European Union diplomat said.

“This situation is very difficult for us, for the EU, to follow the U.S.,” the official said. What the countries remaining in the 2015 deal can do is mainly “lay the ground for talks between the U.S. and Iran,” the official added.

“While American allies often echo Washington’s criticisms of Iran’s destabilizing missile, military and other security policies, they remain doggedly attached to the [Iran] nuclear deal,” said Behnam Ben Taleblu, an Iran expert at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, which opposed the 2015 deal and has advised the Trump administration. “This creates contradictions in their Iran policy, which impedes American coalition-building on Iran.”

Trump has repeatedly shown during 2½ years in office that he’s willing to strike out on his own on foreign policy if he doesn’t get support. But the go-it-alone approach has not always created the results Trump is seeking.

Tom Bossert, who served as Trump’s homeland security adviser until last year, said sanctions are the president’s tool of choice. But, he noted, Trump’s Iranian sanctions are intended to convey the message that he wants to talk — even if no one else does.

“He’s imposing sanctions for a broader purpose,” Bossert said.

So far, though, it hasn’t achieved that purpose. And critics fear it could mean war, even if it’s inadvertent. Before Trump aborted the retaliatory strike on Iran last week, the Pentagon announced it would dispatch 1,000 more American troops to the Middle East, supplementing 1,000 troops sent to the region last month.

“Trump himself wants diplomacy,” said Thomas Wright, a geopolitics expert with the center-left Brookings Institution.

“But it’s been sort of bewildering to all of us as to what those talks would actually look like,” he added.

Jacopo Barigazzi in Brussels contributed to this report.