Yesterday, Iran tried playing hardball to get the US to agree to limit upcoming talks to what amounts to a JCPOA II. They flew a drone at the USS Abraham Lincoln and sent six gunboats to attempt the seizure of a US-flagged oil tanker in the Straits of Hormuz. The US Navy shot down the drone and chased off the Iranian gunboats, but claimed to hold out hopes for talks nonetheless.
Today, Barak Ravid reports for Axios, Donald Trump has decided on hardball too, albeit still in the diplomatic sense:
The U.S. told Iran on Wednesday that it will not agree to Tehran's demands to change the location and format of talks planned for Friday, two U.S. officials told Axios. ...
"We told them it is this or nothing, and they said, 'Ok, then nothing,'" a senior U.S. official said.
- The official said that if the Iranians are willing to go back to the original format, the U.S. is ready to meet this week or next week.
- "We want to reach a real deal quickly or people will look at other options," the senior official said, alluding to Trump's repeated threats of military action.
Well ... good. As I wrote yesterday, the Iranians wanted to limit negotiations to their already destroyed nuclear-weapons development program while refusing to negotiate on the real and acute risks Iran poses in the region: its offensive ballistic-missile systems, its terror proxy networks, and the oppression of 90 million Iranians. It's not clear why Iran demanded a venue shift to Oman from Turkey other than that it's friendlier territory for the regime, but it likely meant to force the US to show some sort of face-saving retreat for the mullahs.
In other words, the mullahs wanted another Obama Iran deal, where Iran could start selling its oil again for meaningless promises of reform. That strategy worked in 2015, and probably came close to working during the Biden Regency, where the politburo at the White House made no effort to disguise their ambitions to reinstate Obama's mad giveaway. For a day or two, it looked as though Trump and his advisers had perhaps entertained the notion as a stepping stone to more talks.
Instead, as the Jerusalem Post reports independently, it gave Trump a good reason to walk away from the table altogether:
"The talks have collapsed," the sources said, noting that the Iranians had been demanding to only discuss the nuclear issue while the Americans wanted to talk about ballistic missiles, Iran's regional terror proxies, and other issues.
"This is an unbridgeable gap," the sources said. ...
A senior Iranian official, however, told Reuters that the talks would only be about Iran's nuclear program, and that its missile program was "off the table."
Previous reports also indicated that Iran has been pushing to restrict the negotiations to the discussion of its long-running nuclear dispute with Western countries.
"If the Iranians want to meet, we're ready," Rubio told reporters on Wednesday, adding that talks would have to include the range of Iran's ballistic missiles, its support for terrorist groups around the Middle East, and its treatment of its own people, besides the nuclear dispute.
Prior to these developments, the Wall Street Journal took note of Iran's attempts to play hardball. They speculated that the Iranians may have wanted to throw Trump off from his usual deal-making strategies, but that experts believe the mullahs have miscalculated:
Iran’s tactics present a challenge for Trump’s style of diplomacy, in which he prefers quick deals negotiated via a small number of trusted lieutenants. With few good options, analysts say Iran is playing for time and risking miscalculation as the armed standoff continues.
“It’s not particularly auspicious in terms of what comes next,” said Michael Wahid Hanna, the U.S. program director at International Crisis Group. “The buildup of force and the threat of force hasn’t created that much room for actual diplomacy. It seems as if the ask was capitulation, effectively. ”
And now the same allies that urged Trump to talk with Iran are grasping that this means an end to that strategy:
Middle Eastern officials involved in efforts to de-escalate the tensions say they are downgrading expectations for Friday’s meeting following their conversations with Iranian diplomats. They say they now expect it to be an exchange of ideas with few concrete outcomes, and some say they are resigned to what they see as an inevitable military confrontation.
In other words, get ready, because the US has all of its assets in place, and now has more leverage to demand cooperation from the Saudis, Qataris, and other Arab nations that wanted another round of talks. The JCPOA is dead, and hopefully the regime will follow soon enough.
Editor’s Note: Thanks to President Trump and his administration’s bold leadership, we are respected on the world stage, and our enemies are being put on notice.
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