RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21587/trump-nuclear-iran

If Iran can enrich a little uranium, it can at any time enrich a lot.

Iran’s latest diktat to the United States openly states that the regime has no interest in compromise, no intention of abandoning its nuclear weapons program, and no fear of impotent threats from a US president.

The Iranian regime at least deserves credit for honesty. The mullahs want to preserve its uranium enrichment program: it gives the regime a loaded gun pointed at the world.

This cat-and-mouse game has been Iran’s playbook for nearly 20 years. The regime pretends to comply with some dismissible Westerner, dial back enrichment slightly to satisfy desperate Western politicians who want to score short-term diplomatic victories, and in return, they extract billions of dollars in sanctions relief, economic benefits and especially political legitimacy.

One thing is certain: the minute it is clear that Iran has acquired nuclear weapons, every country in the Middle East, except for Israel, will submit to it rather than risk being bombed.

Mr. President, you have a choice. You can leave behind a legacy as the great, historic global leader who had the courage to save the entire free world from the Iranian nuclear threat. Or you can seek a meaningless political victory by signing a deal that will just paper over the crisis for twenty minutes. If you negotiate a weak agreement, history will remember you not as a success, but as a gigantic “loser” – and regard you with the same derision as Chamberlain. Chamberlain never got a Nobel Peace Prize and neither will you. But if you save the world from a nuclear Iran, you will go down in history as a second Winston Churchill.

Continuing to negotiate with an Iran that has bluntly stated that it will never give up its claimed “right to enrich uranium” is not diplomacy, it is surrender. Any agreement that allows even limited enrichment is a betrayal of everything the West stands for. We must not walk down that path again.

Mr. President, act now, decisively, and ensure that Iran’s nuclear ambitions are buried forever — and most of all that your legacy as the greatest leader of the 21st Century is enshrined forever.

Iran’s true intentions could not have been made any clearer: Last week, Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi flatly declared the issue of uranium enrichment is “non-negotiable.”

Iran has called President Donald J. Trump’s bluff about bombing the country if the regime does not voluntarily dismantle its uranium enrichment centrifuges, ballistic missiles and the rest of its nuclear program. Trump immediately folded. Now the president seems to be backing down and trying to dodge: “I think we can make a deal without the attack.”

https://amgreatness.com/2025/05/02/president-trump-must-reverse-john-kerrys-worst-concession-to-iran/

On May 8, 2018, President Donald Trump withdrew the United States from what he called “the worst deal ever”—the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran, known as the JCPOA.

For many reasons, President Trump was exactly right. The most crucial reason was an unforgivable concession made to Iran by then-Senator John Kerry in 2011: conceding to Iran the “right” to enrich uranium.

The JCPOA was a bad deal for several reasons, including provisions that allowed Iran to do nuclear weapons-related work while the agreement was in effect, a weak inspection regime that Iran cheated on, and secret side deals that helped Iran evade IAEA inspections. The agreement also wasn’t permanent—it had “sunset provisions” that limited its duration.

In addition, the JCPOA gave Iran $150 billion in sanctions relief. This included $1.7 billion in “pallets of cash” that the U.S. secretly flew to Iran in small planes as ransom to release five innocent Americans being held hostage in Iranian prisons.

But the worst U.S. concession in the JCPOA was the Obama administration’s decision to concede to Iran the “right” to enrich uranium.

Uranium enrichment is the process of concentrating the rare uranium isotope uranium-235 (U-235) so it can be used for either nuclear reactor fuel (3 to 5% U-235) or nuclear weapons fuel (90% U-235).

Prior to the Obama administration, Republican and Democratic administrations were concerned that the spread of uranium enrichment would lead to the proliferation of nuclear weapons because it is very easy for a nation to use uranium enrichment centrifuges initially constructed for peaceful purposes to produce nuclear bomb fuel.

The U.S. was also especially opposed before 2009 to letting Iran enrich uranium because of clear and convincing evidence it had engaged in a broad, covert program to produce nuclear weapons that violated Tehran’s treaty obligations.

John Kerry believed differently. As a senator, he argued in 2009 that he agreed with Iranian officials that because Iran had the right to peaceful nuclear technology under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, it had a right to enrich uranium. While he was still in the Senate in 2011, Kerry informed Iran (through Oman) on behalf of the Obama administration that the United States would acknowledge Iran’s right to enrich uranium at the start of new nuclear talks.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21583/iran-nuclear-stupid-intelligence

Trump argued that the JCPOA failed to address key issues such as Iran’s continued research into producing weapons-grade nuclear material, development of ballistic missiles and Tehran’s support for Islamist terror groups in the Middle East. Is he repeating their mistake?

Reports emerging from the Omani-mediated talks suggest that, rather than seeking the complete dismantlement of Iran’s nuclear programme, Trump is instead prepared to settle for a less demanding settlement, one that allows Tehran to continue with its nuclear activities so long as they are not linked to producing nuclear warheads. At this point, that is folly. If Iran is able to enrich any uranium at all, it can easily enrich it to a weapons-grade level of 90 percent within weeks.

Yet, despite compelling evidence that Iran has continued work on its clandestine programme to produce nuclear weapons, American intelligence chiefs such as Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard continue to insist that there is insufficient evidence to conclude that Iran is actively attempting to build nuclear weapons.

This has led to calls for the administration to undertake an immediate reappraisal of Washington’s intelligence assessment regarding Iran’s nuclear ambitions to acquire nuclear weapons as a devastating matter of urgency, and for the Trump administration to undertake an urgent reappraisal of Gabbard.

Sadly, the Norwegian Nobel Committee will most likely never reward Trump with the Nobel Peace Prize, no matter how much peace he delivers. To them, a worthy recipient was Yasser Arafat, among other leaders now known more for their failures than for success.

Trump instead would do well to focus on becoming the greatest leader of the 21st Century, another Churchill, by ridding the world of Iran’s nuclear weapons threat for once and all, as well as its ballistic missile program and its ability, through its proxies, to keep exporting terrorism.

With the Trump administration seemingly intent on negotiating a new nuclear deal with Iran, it is vital that the White House first makes a realistic assessment of the current state of Iran’s nuclear programme, which most Western intelligence experts believe is aimed at producing nuclear weapons.

After US and Iranian officials met for a third round of talks in the Gulf state of Oman at the weekend, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi openly said that Iran remained extremely cautious about the success of the negotiations to resolve a decades-long standoff.

http://bit.ly/4jr2N1G

It has been maintained that Iran’s Ayatollah regime is Israel’s problem, does not pose a serious threat to the US and global stability, and is manageable via negotiation. However, this assumption is repudiated by the march of facts.

1. Irrespective of Israel, Iran’s Ayatollah regime is driven by a 1,400-year-old fanatical vision, that is underscored by Iran’s school curriculum, mosque sermons, official media and sustained policy. This fanatical vision mandates the toppling of all pro-US Sunni Arab regimes and bringing the “infidel” West to submission, primarily “The Great American Satan.” Since the February 1979 toppling of Iran’s Shah, the Ayatollah regime has emerged as the leading global epicenter of anti-US wars, terrorism, drug trafficking and the proliferation of advanced military systems. It considers Israel as “The Little Satan” – the vanguard of the US in the Middle East and its first line of defense.  Moreover, the Ayatollah regime has expanded its anti-US rogue operations beyond the Persian Gulf and the Middle East, into Africa and Latin America, which is the soft underbelly of the US. For example, since the early 1980s, Iran has established terrorist training camps and ballistic missiles testing grounds in Latin America, solidifying strategic cooperation with drug cartels in Mexico, Columbia, Bolivia, Ecuador and Brazil, as well as with all anti-US Latin American governments, while proliferating terrorist sleeper cells on US soil (according to the FBI).  

2. It is suggested that the Ayatollah regime is willing to talk, and therefore, supposedly, it is incumbent upon the US to expedite negotiations, attempting to clear up misconceptions. Supposedly, negotiation reduces the prospects of – and is preferable to – war.

However, as appealing as is the Iranian talk, the policy toward Iran must be based on the Iranian walk, which has been antithetical to its talk. 

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-most-remarkable-thing-about-the-trump-zelensky-sit-down-at-the-popes-funeral/

In their first tête-à-tête since the fireworks in the Oval Office on Feb. 28, President Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky sat down for a remarkable fifteen-minute meeting at the Vatican Saturday, where both heads of state were attending the funeral of Pope Francis. The Saturday meeting was striking for several reasons, not least because it was just Trump and Zelensky talking things out alone. No aides or translators were present, and while photographers some terrific photos of the two leaders in intense discussion, reporters were not buzzing around performing their usual act of asking questions designed to show the world what an awful person Donald Trump is.

The privateness of the Trump-Zelensky confab is what makes it most remarkable. We just had four years of a president who not only couldn’t make the most insignificant of moves without a cheat sheet telling exactly what to do and when and how to do it. Now even Old Joe Biden’s top aides are admitting that the senescent corruptocrat simply wasn’t there, and that his dementia had advanced to the point that Old Joe knew nothing whatsoever about the policies his autopen was signing into law. What he appeared to know about the war in Ukraine, and everything else, was just an illusion created by his reading words off a teleprompter with reasonable competency.

Even before the misrule of Old Joe’s autopen, we have gotten used to seeing presidents surrounded by clouds of aides, and clearly those aides often did the real spadework in international diplomacy and other areas. Trump, however, is in this, as in so many ways, a sharp departure from what has become the norm for the chief executive. He is entirely capable of handling the negotiations with Zelensky (and others) without any input from aides, and even without their presence.

And on Saturday, amid all the pomp and bustle of the papal funeral, he did. White House communications director Steven Cheung later issued a terse announcement: “President Trump and President Zelenskyy met privately today and had a very productive discussion.”

https://amgreatness.com/2025/04/25/trumps-bold-diplomacy-on-the-ukraine-war-and-iranian-nuclear-program/

There was a lot of movement this week on two intractable global security problems when the Trump Administration put forward proposals that defied the foreign policy establishment to end the war in Ukraine and halt Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons.

There were predictable condemnations of Trump’s proposals from parties to these disputes, European leaders, foreign policy experts, and the mainstream media. However, Trump officials made clear that they will not agree to endless negotiations on these disputes and are prepared to walk away if the president’s proposals are rejected.

To end the Ukraine-Russia War, Trump officials put forward what has been called President Trump’s final offer to end the war.

Under this plan, Russia would receive formal U.S. recognition of Crimea, which Russia seized from Ukraine in 2014, as Russian territory. Washington would also agree to de facto recognition of Russia’s occupation of territory it seized in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine. The U.S. would pledge not to support Ukraine’s membership in NATO, lift sanctions against Russia imposed since 2014, and offer U.S. economic cooperation.

Ukraine would be offered “a robust security guarantee” from European military forces. It would also get back part of the Kharkiv province currently occupied by Russia, navigation rights in the Dnieper River, and assistance in post-war rebuilding.

Ukraine reportedly will also have the right to its own army and defense industry as part of a peace agreement. If true, this means the U.S. is rejecting Putin’s demand that Ukraine be demilitarized as part of a final settlement.

Trump’s proposals will be very tough for Ukraine to accept, and it was not a surprise when Ukrainian President Zelensky immediately and publicly rejected the U.S. offering at least de facto recognition of Russia’s occupation of Crimea and areas of the Donbas. Zelensky’s allies in the U.S. and Europe echoed this criticism. Trump replied that the U.S. was not asking Zelensky to recognize Crimea as Russian territory. Trump and Vice President Vance also faulted Zelensky for publicly criticizing the new U.S. proposals, which they said were harmful to the peace process.

Critics of President Trump’s Ukraine peace proposal are arguing that it does not hold Russia accountable for its vicious and unprovoked aggression against Ukraine. Some claimed it rewards this aggression. Although these are principled positions, Trump’s hard-nosed realist plan may be the only chance to end the war. Trump’s plan recognizes facts on the ground that are unlikely to change and offers a chance to get both sides to the negotiating table and end the war.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21564/trump-anti-israel-officials-iran

The appointment, however, of several officials to key national security positions in the Trump administration, who vehemently oppose direct military action against Iran, has raised concerns that the White House might be backing away from its commitment to eliminate the threat Iran poses to global security.

In particular, these concerns relate to the recent appointments to the Pentagon of influential figures such as John Byers for Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense (South and South-East Asia), and Michael DiMino, a former career CIA military analyst and counterterrorism official, for Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense (Middle East).

Similarly, concerns have arisen that DiMino will be able to use his position as the Pentagon’s new chief Middle East policy adviser to advance an anti-Israel stance while questioning the Trump administration’s confrontational stance towards Iran.

As with Byers, DiMino was previously linked to the libertarian Koch brothers, having held tenure as a fellow at the Washington think tank Defense Priorities, which is funded by the Koch team.

Special Envoy Steve Witkoff recently downgraded Trump’s professed demands by asking Iran just to lower uranium enrichment — a statement he quickly had to walk back. Iran has already stated that it could move its stockpiles of highly enriched uranium to “safe and undisclosed locations,” presumably for use at a later time. Russia, in an apparent burst of generosity, has offered to host the enriched uranium. How kind of them!

While Trump keeps offering perfect negotiating parameters, such as, “All hostages must be released by Saturday or all hell will break out,” or, “Iran issue is easy to solve, they cannot obtain nuclear weapons,” his statements always seem to be instantly undermined.