Will Trump and Witkoff repeat Obama and Kerry’s Iran blunders? Negotiations led by a compromised envoy for an administration that remains divided over stopping Tehran’s nuclear ambitions aren’t likely to succeed. Jonathan Tobin
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It’s too soon to declare the Trump administration’s policy toward Iran a failure. In time—and perhaps less time than Tehran might think—President Donald Trump may resolve the open debate between members of his foreign-policy team over whether continued efforts at diplomacy are the proper course of action or if military force is needed to stop the Islamist regime from getting a nuclear weapon.
At present, however, the debate going on inside the administration about the issue and the manifest incompetence of his already compromised Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff, does not, to understate the matter, inspire much confidence in a good outcome being achieved. The only reason to think otherwise is if you trust the president’s ability to tell the difference between a deal that actually eliminates the Iranian threat and one that won’t, and believe that he’s truly willing to back up his bellicose language with action.
What stands out about the situation is that it appears to be the only major issue on which Trump’s appointees are not speaking with one voice and pursuing a common agenda. And it is that division within its councils that is both preventing a decisive approach and likely causing the Iranian regime to think that it can get away with the same tactics that allowed it to emerge as the victor in past negotiations with the Obama and Biden administrations.
In Trump’s first administration, the White House staff was seemingly always at odds with each other. Trump loyalists, including family members, were constantly at war with one another on a host of issues. There were also a large number of officials, including cabinet officers, who thought they were there to play the role of the “adults” restraining Trump and those who agreed with him from actually implementing the policies he ran on.
Leaking to the ‘Times’
Part of the way that internecine combat was made clear to the public was the deluge of leaks to the press, including outlets that were hostile to Trump, like The New York Times, intended to embarrass White House court rivals, the president or undermine specific policy initiatives. To date, there has been little of that in Trump 2.0, as just about everyone in the administration is on the same page in terms of their loyalty to the president and his agenda.
The one exception to that rule is Iran. That was proved by stories in the Times, which were clearly the result of leaks that spoke of the debate about what to do about the nuclear threat from Tehran that is going on at the highest levels, as well as a decision to essentially veto an Israeli strike on Iranian nuclear targets.
As the articles were at pains to point out, there are two factions among Trump’s foreign-policy team. One favors a tough stand on Iran. According to the leak-based stories published by the newspaper, it is composed of U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, National Security Advisor Mike Waltz and Gen. Michael Kurilla, the head of U.S. Central Command. They are likely supported by other prominent figures, such as Secretary of State Marco Rubio. On the other side is Vice President JD Vance, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and White House chief of staff Susie Wiles, with Witkoff in agreement with them.
The debate going on in the West Wing hinges on two linked issues.
One is whether or not to use force on Iran during a window of opportunity that opened up last October, when an Israeli strike largely destroyed Iran’s air defenses. With Iran essentially unable to repel air attacks, its Hezbollah auxiliaries in Lebanon—also defeated by Israel and no longer in a position to threaten the Jewish state in retaliation—as well as the regime of its Syrian ally, Bashar Assad, overthrown, the stage was set for a joint U.S.-Israeli operation that could potentially wipe out Iran’s nuclear program.
The other is what would be the American goal in any negotiations with Iran? Should it be the complete elimination of Iran’s nuclear program or merely an effort to slow down or impose restrictions on the regime’s ability to refine uranium?
Iran appeasers at the table
Vance and Gabbard are opposed to a military strike and want the United States to avoid demanding Iran’s surrender of its nuclear program, lest that guarantee that any talks with Tehran fail. With Hegseth and Waltz undermined by the recent Signalgate scandal, Vance and his side in the squabble, who are being cheered on from the sidelines by the likes of talk-show host and Trump inner-circle member Tucker Carlson, who are hostile to Israel, seem to have prevailed for the moment.
The ostensible rationale for delaying a strike on Iran is the reasonable notion that it’s just common sense to try diplomacy before resorting to force.
Despite accusations of isolationism, Trump has always been tough on Iran. He was opposed to former President Barack Obama’s disastrously weak 2015 nuclear deal with Tehran on the grounds that, rather than stopping the threat of it creating such a weapon, it actually guaranteed that it would eventually get one with Western approval after a relatively brief delay. And he’s been aggressive in seeking to curb Iran’s network of international terrorism—something that was illustrated by his order for the assassination in January 2020 of Qassem Soleimani, the head of the regime’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
But Trump is also opposed to starting new foreign military adventures in the Middle East, a sentiment that is shared by most Americans who rightly soured on the notion of any further crusades to export democracy after the fiascos in Iraq and Afghanistan started by President George W. Bush.
For the moment, the president has been persuaded to at least try to get Iran to give up its nuclear ambitions without using force, though with the proviso that military action could be resorted to if diplomacy fails.
A fool’s errand
The problem with that approach is that the history of the last 15 years of American diplomatic engagement with Iran shows that negotiating with the Islamist regime is a fool’s errand. Trump wasn’t far off the mark when he said this week that the Iranians are already stalling this new round of talks because “they’re used to dealing with stupid people.”
Tehran has emerged from every negotiation with the United States as the clear victor. The reason for that is not only the fact that those tasked with conducting diplomacy with Iran under the Obama and Biden administrations were not exactly masters of the art of the deal. It’s that they weren’t really so much interested in disarming Iran as they were in effecting a rapprochement with it so as to reorder American foreign policy in the region.
Obama and his Secretary of State, John Kerry, started in a strong position when they began talks with Iran in 2013, as most of the world had lined up behind sanctions aimed at forcing the regime to give up its nuclear program. Obama even pledged that it would be the goal of any talks with it during his 2012 foreign-policy debate with Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney. But once Iran said “no” to all demands, Obama and Kerry not only folded in the talks; they quickly embraced a position in which they would give their blessing to its nuclear program, albeit with a number of easily evaded restrictions that would expire before 2030.
Their purpose was not just to avoid conflict but to essentially replace Israel and Saudi Arabia as Washington’s chief allies in the region with Iran.
The Obama deal myth
Democrats and their press cheerleaders still seek to promote the myth that Obama’s deal was working and that it was Trump’s supposedly impulsive decision to withdraw from it that enabled Iran to become a threshold nuclear power. This is false.
When Trump became president in 2017, he understood that sooner or later, a U.S. president was going to have to scrap that deal and either replace it with a tougher one or attack Iran. He wisely chose not to procrastinate and withdrew from Obama’s agreement in May 2018, after which he embarked on a series of sanctions that devastated its economy and stripped the regime of its ability to effectively fund terrorism. Had he been re-elected in 2020—or if his successor, President Joe Biden, had stuck to this course—Tehran might have been forced to surrender its nuclear program. But Biden, who put pro-Iran diplomat Robert Malley in charge of the issue, fecklessly reverted to Obama’s appeasement policies. That allowed the Islamic Republic not only to get immeasurably closer to a nuclear weapon, but the sanctions relief gave it the ability to escalate anti-Israel and anti-Western terrorism in the region using its Hamas, Hezbollah and Houthi proxies.
Sadly, the advice that Trump is getting from Vance and Gabbard seems to be steering the administration toward a repeat of those mistakes. And by putting the inexperienced and naive Witkoff, who was bailed out by Iran’s Qatari allies in a New York City real estate deal, and whose statements and actions mark him as someone who is not only tainted by his business connections but compromised by them, the talks with Iran seem headed for another round of Obama-Kerry-style appeasement.
Unfortunately, it might be too late for another “maximum pressure” sanctions campaign as employed by Trump 1.0 to work. With the backing of Russia, and especially China, which is buying almost all of Iran’s oil exports, it may be able to survive another round of sanctions, even ones that forced America’s European “allies” to give up its economic ties to the regime.
After the first inconclusive meeting between Iranian officials and Witkoff, the U.S. envoy first said his goal was a deal that would allow Tehran to keep its nuclear program and then backtracked on that staggering blunder. That, combined with a bellicose statement by Trump about using military force if the Islamist regime continued to try to drag out the talks by “tapping us along,” raised hopes that he was ready to act in concert with Israel to end the threat from Iran.
But then came the leaks to the Times that made it clear that, at least for the moment, Vance and Gabbard are in the driver’s seat on Iran policy with the witless and possibly corrupt Witkoff doing their bidding in talks that seem designed to serve Tehran’s goal of putting off American and Israeli strikes until it might be too late.
Trump should not be blamed for wanting to achieve the goal of ending Iran’s nuclear project without the use of force. But everything known about the Iranian regime and its diplomatic history makes it obvious that it has no intention of giving up its nuclear dreams without a fight. And if, as Trump and every one of his predecessors has said at one time or another, preventing Tehran from getting a weapon is a goal that would justify military force if there was no viable alternative, then sooner or later, the United States is going to have to act.
A possibly fatal delay
Moreover, delaying a joint U.S.-Israeli strike on Iran may not be so much a postponement as a decision that will ensure that Iran will never be attacked. In time, the Iranians—with Russian and Chinese help—will restore their air defenses and make it even harder to attack their nuclear facilities, as well as hide other assets in what is a large and mountainous country.
If the goal of the Iran appeasers at the cabinet table is—as the Times articles seem to suggest—a willingness to tolerate Iran as a threshold or even actual nuclear power, that is a momentous development. If Washington were to treat a nuclear Iran as an insignificant threat to U.S. interests or that of its allies, then what we are witnessing may be nothing less than a repeat of Obama’s folly. A new deal with Iran that doesn’t compel the dismantling of its nuclear program or force it to give up financing international terror—a key point that no one in the administration, including Trump, seems to be currently interested in—will have enormous consequences for the region. And what would ensue would likely be a similar rerun of what happened after Biden relaxed sanctions, including an upsurge in Iranian-backed terror, such as the Hamas-led assault in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, and the Houthi interdiction of international shipping in the Horn of Africa.
Yet for all of the leaking about the factions in the White House, this is an administration with a strong leader who is not likely to be swayed by New York Times articles any more than he is by a foreign-policy establishment and experts who have always been willing to endanger Israel and the West by going soft on Iran.
Obama knew what he wanted with respect to Iran. So does Trump, though his goal of stopping, rather than empowering and enriching the Islamist regime, is very different. This president prides himself on not engaging in the sort of “stupid” diplomacy with Iran employed by Obama and Biden that weakened the United States and strengthened the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism. He also knows that Iran is trying to spin out the talks until the window of its air-defense vulnerability closes, and it gets even closer to its quest for a bomb. Still, if the Iran appeasers among his advisers continue to prevail and the ayatollahs run out the clock by continuing to exploit Witkoff’s incompetence, then that is exactly what he will be doing.
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS (Jewish News Syndicate). Follow him: @jonathans_tobin.
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