Iran. Deal. Again.
If you can make sense of this, please be my guest. Don’t ask anyone to agree with you, though. I’ve got my theories about this back-and-forth behavior, and have stated them. But that doesn’t mean I’m correct either.
But here goes:
We reported earlier how President Donald Trump lit up the Iranian state media for leaks that they were claiming about the deal that is about to be finalized.
As we noted, the regime’s foreign ministry spokesperson confirmed the deal was close to being finalized.
Now, in what has to be a first, the Iranian foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, scolded the Iranian media for what they had reported about the deal, indicating they were getting things wrong. Then, Trump quoted Araghchi, probably another first.
Get it?
This is the rumored deal:
1. Nuclear material will be destroyed and removed
2. Nuclear program will be dismantled
3. None of their money released until they perform
4. Strait of Hormuz will be open
5. No Iran funding of terrorist groups
I’d like to add, “stop killing your own people.” Or even better, “step down” and have free and fair elections. I know, that’s not happening. But will those five points happen? How will all of it be enforced? It’s a nice wishlist, but I’ll believe it when I see it.
And then what? If a Democrat gets elected president, will everything go out the window? Isn’t that what the Iranian regime – which plays the long game – is counting on? How would the Trump administration be able to guarantee a deal would last long enough to matter? I don’t think they’re unaware of the problem. But I hope they’re very creative about the solution.
Then again, the deal may fall through again, and the war resume.
When the Democrats get back in power, and they annul everything that Mr. Trump has done, will they accept responsibility for the regional nuclear war that they will enable? Since the first target will be Israel, I suspect they will be just fine with that.
SCOTTtheBADGER:
Back when Obama first negotiated his Iran deal and turned on Israel, it started to become obvious that the destruction of Israel was not only perfectly okay with him and some Democrats, but that it was probably considered a feature and not a bug. In the years since his administration, that attitude on the part of Democrats has spread and grown.
Can you say Panmunjom.
The Democratic Party USA has become a terrible, horrible example of moral depravity. One must be ignorant, stupid or evil (often more than one category) to be a Democratic adherent.
Do not in any way support the Democratic agenda. Not in Maine, not elsewhere.
They are traitors, evildoers, in our midst.
If the Strait gets closed, bombing can resume fairly promptly. This is not like the endless and mostly pointless arguments about “inspections” of the nuclear sites.
Our perfidious media does none of us any good, wilfully boosting our enemies rather than simply report the facts. It’s a shameful, horrible thing they do.
Consequently we must work to remind ourselves what genuinely great things have been accomplished to date, and these are many taken together, quite momentous in import. Iranian Islamic supremacy exists today in dire straits indeed, if not wholly doomed altogether. Worse developments is all they can expect. So I believe we can be relatively sanguine about the future to come.
My guess is that the Trump administration knows that regime change is the only real solution. However regime change is The Change That Must Not Be Named.
And there must never be significant American boots on the ground, much less casualties.
The Iranian leadership is on very shaky ground. Iran will collapse eventually as its economy suffocates. But just when is hard to say.
Meanwhile I am sure that the US and Israel are arming Iranians behind the scenes and other things to push Iran over the edge. Trump may even be stringing Iran along with all this treaty talk.
Who knows? Certainly not me.
I wonder if stringing the negotiations along is a way of getting a fix on the physical location of the people that have declared themselves the power brokers in Iran, by virtue of their power to negotiate terms.
I hope so, Aggie. It would be a very Sithy thing to do.
If Trump gets the uranium before any Democrat comes back to power, then he accomplished his goal.
To Leland’s point, I’ve read a whole lot about how Iran “plays the long game”. When I read those essays I wondered, once they realized Trump was serious, why they didn’t just give him damn near everything he wanted, wait for an isolationist Republican or a Democrat to come into office, and get right back to business.
My own answer to that question is they couldn’t risk looking that weak to those they lord over. Uprisings have uncertain outcomes. Or maybe they’re just overrated in their long game skills.
Trump is commander-in-chief until Jan 2028. He should maintain the blockade until then, and let Iran starve and crumble. Never mind the mid-term elections; he still holds the veto pen.
@Mike Plaiss: …why [the Iranians] didn’t just give him damn near everything he wanted, wait for an isolationist Republican or a Democrat to come into office, and get right back to business.
There’s also the uranium dust. Trump has been clear that the dust is a top, non-negotiable priority.
That dust is enough to build ten or so nuclear weapons and it’s taken them close to 30 years to enrich, costing billions of dollars . They were so close to their goal. Imagine the frustration! If the US takes the dust away, they have to start over from scratch.
I’d say the Iranian leaders are committed to two things: their survival and keeping the enriched uranium at all costs.
@ huxley > “I’d say the Iranian leaders are committed to two things: their survival and keeping the enriched uranium at all costs.”
Those may not be compatible goals.
There is a distinction, however, between “their survival” as a group of leaders with the same purposes; and “their survival” as individuals in the group.
How many individual leaders are willing to die to protect the uranium (“keeping [it] at all costs”), and how many would be left (“their survival”) if Trump thinks he has to reopen kinetic action to seize it?
I think the combined US and Israeli intelligence are following the internal developments and we are waiting for the inflation and revenue shortages to play out.
It appears that traffic is moving through Hormuz and their radars have been blinded. Their proxies will run out of money, and they have no allies who will come to help.
Time is on our side, waiting is probably the right thing to be doing, while distracting the world with claims that a deal is near.
Calm yourselves, patriots.
1. Quote from this weekend’s Makor Rishon weekly newspaper (Israel):
“You can’t recover from decades of neglect and erosion of deterrence in mere months.”
They were talking about Israel’s actions in Lebanon, but it applies here as well. Remind yourselves that the time-frame expectation is an artificial creation of the hostile media-pundit class.
Trump’s cabinet members repeatedly back up the President for insisting on a real deal.
Trump has so far kept his only solid promise – no major “boots on the ground” incursion…. with that limitation, economic chokepoints and the waiting game make sense.
Remember: the timeframe is *years*…. it will take several months to “verify” uranium and other aspects of the program are eliminated. Et cetera
Note that Reza Pahlavi (the Shah’s son) has vanished from the airwaves and intertubes… that part of the story has not even begun.
2. Every day of “stalemate” chokes China and other unsavories. We are not the ones in a rush.
3. Both Trump-n-Yahu are now working to time Big, Beautiful headlines to election cycles. With the World Cup and America’s 250th observances thrown in… I personally believe much of the “tension” between the 2 of them is staged…. Neither of them is about to share anything with the press, and both have cleared the weasels out of their inner circles… much of what you are reading and hearing is an increasingly desperate chattering class trying to fill air time with speculation.
IMO, Fernandez’ Three Conjectures will hold until some cosmic thing happens to Islam. Cannot not.
However, suppose Trump has a deal with the leaders, whichever ones had the microphone most recently, and this deal goes forward. Is there a codicil that Trump will tell Bibi to keep Mossad at home? Maybe Mossad is in charge of internal issues/
Would be fun to watch in terms of get-what-you-have-coming.
No one here confronts the Trump conundrum that Iran forces us into. And rarely, if ever, elsewhere have we seen it. (Note to self: I ought to check on Lee Smith’s writings, recently. Do our views overlap or diverge a lot?)
Namely, after Afghanistan, Iran is the sole nation most well-endowed with defensible mountains. In the world. This, plus the 90 million population there, which is maybe 4X bigger than Afghanistan, makes it a super-tough nut to crack. In terms of regime change.
I’m sure the first hope in going to war with Iran was that regime control would prove fatally brittle. We’ve seen this in the fall of Soviet Communism, as well as recently in Venezuela.
At least “brittle” applies well to totalitarian countries, like most truly authoritarian regimes.
But legitimacy can maintained by fear, which is most widely used. Or, it can also be maintained by zealotry.
The last war the US waged against a righteous and zealous country was in the Pacific, and Tojo’s militarised Japan, in literally a war for racial supremacy, rooted in Shintoism.
I believe Victor David Hanson has drawn attention to this parallel, recently.
Zealotry (like fear) can keep a population motivated into solidarity. For normal people, this wanes as they grow weary. But does totalitarian Shi’ite based Islam?
The backstop of the hoped for brittle and breakable theory is economic instability and poverty. This has Trump and Israel playing for time to work, and downgrade their power of legitimacy …hence, the past two months of Middle East party-cake diplomacy.
This could go on for many months. Yet VDH hopes Trump will go all out, militarily — surrender or die! Like with Japan under Tojo.
But I don’t see this happening before the November elections.
Another form this could take is to invade Iranian islands in the Gulf and base troops and detection and attack corps on the ring of mountains to eliminate all threats defeating open oil shipments out of the Persian Gulf.
Once this total cut-off of oil revenue is achieved, admittedly with US casualties, another productive military target can be launched.
Namely, taking over regions of uranium processing and production and expropriating all nuclear materiel from Iran. This phase could take at least 6 months. Maybe longer.
I’m sure Team Trump hopes for a friendlier Congress to support him in a “finish the fight” resolve.
At any rate, these are the two tactical moves available after a “waiting them out” strategy fails because of excess Revolutionary Islamic zealotry.