President Trump’s attitude towards Iran is causing many to scratch their heads.
He has threatened the Iranian regime that unless it verifiably dismantles its nuclear program, America and Israel will destroy it.
He has backed this up by moving more US warships to the region and deploying around one third of America’s B-2 stealth bombers to Diego Garcia.
Trump’s commitment to safeguard Israel is not in doubt. He’s also the man who, in his first term, took America out of the disastrous 2015 nuclear deal brokered by former President Barack Obama and imposed instead a punishing sanctions regime to weaken Iran.
Yet now the US is negotiating with the regime over its nuclear program, and both sides say this is going well. On Truth Social, Trump said he would much prefer a negotiated agreement to military action.
But the regime is run by religious fanatics of the Shia “Twelver” sect, who believe that an apocalypse will bring to earth the “Twelfth Imam”or Shia messiah.
And as the regime repeatedly tells us, it intends to destroy first Israel and then America and the west.
There can be no meaningful negotiation with a regime that has such a non-negotiable and apocalyptic agenda. When Iran says the current negotiations are “positive,” that means it’s confident it has the upper hand.
The Iranians are the most skillful and manipulative negotiators in the world. They play multi-dimensional chess in which they identify the weaknesses of their opponents and then mercilessly play on them.
Dismayingly, Trump’s chief negotiator Steven Witkoff seems to have fallen for the Iranians’ wiles.
In an interview with the podcaster and Trump “whisperer” Tucker Carlson, Witkoff said the conflict over Tehran’s nuclear program had “a real possibility of being solved diplomatically, not because I’ve talked to anybody in Iran but because logically, it makes sense . . . I think anything can be solved with dialogue by clearing up misconception and miscommunication and disconnects between people.”
But this isn’t an argument involving muddled messages. This is a crisis in which the world’s most aggressive terrorist state and declared enemy of Israel and the west is poised to arm itself with nuclear weapons.
Trump has now dialed down his aim from destroying Iran’s nuclear program to ensuring that it isn’t used to produce nuclear weapons.
This was precisely the formula arrived at in the 2015 Obama deal, and it’s as worthless now as it was then. For it would enable Iran to retain a substantial nuclear infrastructure, which it could ramp up to weaponization at any time.
Witkoff appears to be placing all his faith in “verification” that Iran would keep its side of the bargain. But given that the regime ran rings round the inspection program under the 2015 deal, the idea of verifying any commitment it makes is for the birds.
Iran has been militarily very much weakened by Israel’s decimation of Hezbollah and its neutralization of Iranian air defences. This is therefore the opportunity to strike.
Instead of seizing the moment, Trump is astoundingly heading for a deal that looks horribly like Obama 2.0. And this when Iran has enriched enough uranium for several nukes and is reportedly racing to fit warheads to missiles.
So what’s going on? Why the mixed messages?
The reason is a deep division within the Trump administration, which reflects a similar fissure within the MAGA movement itself.
One side within Team Trump, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, National Security Adviser Mike Waltz and the head of US Central Command Gen. Michael Kurilla, who share the view of Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu that only a military attack to destroy Iran’s nuclear program will eradicate the threat it poses.
The other side, including Vice President JD Vance, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and the person credited with having more influence than anyone over the president, Tucker Carlson, believes America should avoid force and instead pursue diplomacy and negotiation.
Generally called “isolationists,’” those on this side are actually anti-interventionists. This is because they aren’t conservatives — committed to conserving what is valuable — but rather libertarians, who believe that government has no business interfering with people’s lives either at home or abroad.
Believing therefore that intervening anywhere abroad isn’t in America’s interests, they cast around for the oldest reason in the world to explain what seems an otherwise inexplicable harm being urged upon their nation — that the pressure to intervene must all be the fault of the Jews.
Michael Dimino, Trump’s deputy assistant Secretary of Defense for the Middle East, said on a podcast before taking office: “There are no vital or existential US interests in the Middle East.”
On the US presence in Iraq and Syria, he added, “We’re really there to counter Iran, and that’s really at the behest of the Israelis and the Saudis.”
The failure to acknowledge the obvious, that Israel is America’s vital front-line of defense in the Middle East, is astounding — and, from a man in such a sensitive defense position, terrifying.
In a huge irony, this anti-interventionism places these MAGA folk in the same position as the left.
Left-wingers hold that all conflict can be ended by negotiation, compromise and peace processes. Arrogantly assuming that everyone in the world is, like them, governed by reason and self interest, they fail to understand the mindset of Islamist religious fanatics who believe they have a sacred duty to kill “unbelievers” in the name of God.
The reason is that the left despises the western nation state and has put its faith instead in transnational laws and institutions, such as the UN and human rights culture, which all dance to the same multicultural, moral relativist and anti-Israel, anti-western tune.
These elites are busily dismantling their culture’s historic identity. This has opened up the west up to steady incursion by Islamists intent on conquering it for Islam. It’s unable to counter the threat from the Islamist death cult because it’s got a death wish of its own.
The revolt against that by millions of patriotic citizens has led to the rise of “populist” leaders and put Donald Trump into the White House.
Many therefore thought that Trump would lead a cultural counter-resistance against western decadence and defeatism. But although he has set about dismantling the ruinous diversity agenda and is holding the universities’ feet to the fire over their toleration of antisemitism on campus, he isn’t a conservative but a transactional libertarian. And his desire to avoid war and use diplomacy instead lines him up with the Kumbaya delusionists of the left.
It’s possible that he’ll see through the Iranian’s trickery. But there’s no reason to doubt Witkoff who says he always speaks for the president and who told Carlson: “Trump’s directive is clear: prioritize diplomacy, avoid war, and repair relationships through trust and mutual respect.”
If Trump doesn’t bomb Iran’s nuclear program, he will become a busted flush. Former president Joe Biden advertised American weakness and as a result made the world an infinitely more dangerous place.
Now the grandmasters of Tehran are sizing up the man who replaced him in the White House and are rubbing their hands over making a fool of him too.
Melanie Phillips’s new book is “The Builder’s Stone: How Jews and Christians Built the West — and Why Only They Can Save It.”
This story originally appeared on NYPost
