Progressives and other opponents of military conflict with Iran scored a surprise victory last week when President Donald Trump announced imminent negotiations with Tehran.
Talks took place over the weekend in Oman as US negotiators, under Trump’s direction, seek a new arrangement aimed at constraining Iran’s nuclear program. A second round was confirmed to be set for this Saturday in Rome, signaling that the negotiations are proceeding smoothly (so far), though two principals, US Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff and Iranian foreign minister Abbas Araghchi, issued terse conflicting statements on social media.
“Iran must stop and eliminate its nuclear enrichment and weaponization program,” Witkoff tweeted. Araghchi responded that a full dismantling of enrichment capabilities was off the table. But signs of an agreement taking shape were apparent.
Then, on Wednesday, a new bombshell from The New York Times: Trump had personally waved off the prospect of U.S. support for an Israeli-developed plan to strike Iranian nuclear facilities as soon as next month.
“I think that Iran has a chance to have a great country and to live happily without death,” said Trump on Thursday, speaking to reporters at the White House.
This shift in posture is not going over well in the hawkish corners of Washington’s foreign policy sphere.
“Any deal with the Islamic Republic of Iran must not only verifiably eliminate every element of its nuclear program, but must also crush its ballistic missile capability and its support of terror proxies around the world. Anything less is simply Obama redux,” warned former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, one of the first-termers not invited back to the Cabinet this time.
Senator Lindsey Graham, one of the Hill’s loudest Iran hawks, added that any deal “must include the total dismantling of Iran’s nuclear infrastructure and include not only U.S. but worldwide supervision.”
“I fear anything less could be a catastrophic mistake,” he tweeted.
As discussions among the neoconservative wing of the GOP on Capitol Hill veered in support of direct strikes on Iran’s nuclear and ballistic missile facilities earlier this year, Donald Trump announced the resumption of his first-term “maximum pressure” campaign in February. The strategy involves significant increases to both implementation and enforcement of anti-Iran sanctions, and other measures aimed at driving down the country’s oil exports.
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But the writing was already on the wall by then. Over the wintertime presidential transition period, Trump purged his team of a handful of maximum pressure supporters and took the further steps of punishing some he apparently saw as disloyal — John Bolton, a target of alleged Iranian assassination plots, lost his security detail. Others from his first terms were simply not invited back as the president went even further in his efforts to staff agencies with MAGA loyalists.
Now it seems clear: Trump is treating his maximum pressure strategy in a manner very much similar to his implementation of so-called “reciprocal” tariffs on dozens of US trading partners — as a bargaining chip.
Those same hawks, now isolated from Trumpworld, have resorted to publicly calling on the president to hold to certain red lines, some of which (like the demand for Iran to abandon all civilian nuclear programs and uranium enrichment) are likely to be unacceptable to Iranian negotiators.
With only one round of negotiations complete, it’s impossible to say where talks will end up. But the wing of MAGA Republicanism opposed to foreign interventions and “endless war” is celebrating the progress the president has already made in shedding the neoconservatives from his foreign policy team.
“The Trump Administration is George W. Bush’s third term, or not, and that’s his whole legacy,” wrote Curt Mills, executive director of The American Conservative magazine.
“So far, POTUS is sagely waving off this nonsense. But the stakes are that high.”
They’re also railing against the devastation that a war with a Russian-backed Middle Eastern power could wrought.
“How many [wealthy kids] are on the front line? How many of their kids are in that carrier battle group?” Steve Bannon asked, referring to American aristocrats.
“Your sons and daughters are going to be in those carrier battle groups. Your sons and daughters are going to be in the first wave,” he cautioned on his War Room podcast on Thursday. “Your sons and daughters will be doing the bombing runs if that has to happen.”
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