Here’s a lesson President Donald Trump should have learned a long time ago: Israel and its American lobby cannot be satisfied. No matter how much you give them, they always want more. Right now, they want Trump to restart the war with Iran, Israel’s chief adversary in the Middle East.
Will Trump give them what they want? I fear he will.
In early February, weeks before Trump launched the war, I argued in The American Conservative that Iran was his “Israeli influence test.” War with Iran would advance Israeli interests, not American ones, so it seemed a good test case for whether U.S. foreign policy served a foreign nation. I predicted Trump would fail the test, and I was right. So much for America First.
After the war went much worse than Trump expected, he wisely secured a two-week ceasefire in early April, and mere hours before the truce was set to end, he wisely extended it. The U.S. and Iran have used the opportunity to engage in diplomacy, mediated by Pakistan, but negotiations haven’t seemed promising—until this week.
Axios reported Wednesday that the Trump administration “believes it’s getting close to an agreement with Iran on a one-page memorandum of understanding to end the war and set a framework for more detailed nuclear negotiations.” The reporter, Barak Ravid, has been derided as a White House stenographer who publishes stories that seem designed to calm the markets rather than uncover the truth. But this time, other journalists have corroborated Ravid’s reporting.
Here’s an important development and cause for hope: Iran seems willing to accept a moratorium on uranium enrichment, a key stage in the process of making nuclear fuel. “I do think there are signs that parts of the Iranian establishment are more open to creative arrangements around enrichment levels or temporary limits, especially given the economic pressure Iran has been under,” Sina Toossi, an Iran expert at the Center for International Policy, told The American Conservative.
Elements of the Islamic Republic have at times denied that Iran was mulling a moratorium. But the journalist Ryan Grim of Drop Site News, which has sources in the Iranian government, told TAC that Tehran seems willing to pause enrichment in exchange for U.S. concessions like sanctions relief. “They have said as much,” Grim insisted.
That would be a big concession on a major sticking point. If the Islamic Republic agreed to a yearslong moratorium, followed by caps on enrichment far below the amount needed to build nuclear weapons, then Trump could claim to have struck a deal with Tehran better than Barack Obama’s Iran nuclear accord, which he exited in 2018.
Sounds great, right?
Not if you’re one of “the Marks,” a troika of Israel-first American conservatives who exert influence over the president. Mark Levin of Fox News, Mark Dubowitz of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), and Marc Thiessen of the Washington Post are getting nervous that Trump might give peace a chance.
Levin wrote Wednesday on X, “If the Axios report is close to accurate, the Iranian regime will survive, the Iranian people will face even more extensive brutality, and the Israeli government could fall in the October election. A disastrous result.”
Thiessen complained that Trump on Tuesday paused “Project Freedom” barely a day after it began. That was the U.S. mission to guide vessels through the Strait of Hormuz, a crucial chokepoint for global trade which Iran has effectively closed. After Iran launched attacks in the Hormuz, Trump said he was suspending the operation to create space for diplomacy.
Thiessen wasn’t pleased. “They take that as weakness,” he wrote in a tweet reposted by Dubowitz. “They don’t think Trump is willing to bomb them again. They think they have leverage. He needs to prove them wrong.”
That the Marks are freaking out is a good thing, and it wasn’t the only sign this week that the reported diplomatic progress is real.
“One credible signal that peace talks are actually proceeding is this massive airstrike that Israel carried out on Beirut just now,” Grim said on Wednesday. “Whenever you’re getting closer to an agreement, you usually tend to see the Israeli military ramp up its violence.”
Iran has always maintained that the ceasefire covers the entire regional war, including Israel’s military campaign in Lebanon. That’s why Israel massively escalated violence in Lebanon after the ceasefire was announced—to sabotage the truce—and in Grim’s view, it’s why Israel attacked Beirut on Wednesday amid new reports of progress in negotiations.
If Israel is ramping up its sabotage campaign, then Trump just might be on the right track. Still, I think it’s more likely that he’s careering toward another calamity. After all, Israel and its supporters usually get most of what they want from Trump, and despite this week’s burst of optimism, I haven’t been in a glass-half-full kind of mood.
Iran may have dropped its resistance to a moratorium on uranium enrichment, but Trump has developed a new fixation: getting Iran to ship its 900 pounds of highly-enriched uranium to the United States. “We’re going to get it,” he told a White House reporter on Wednesday. In a phone interview the same day with PBS, Trump was adamant. “It goes to the United States,” he said.
Where might Trump have gotten the idea that Iran must give its enriched uranium to America? Take a wild guess.
Al Jazeera reports: “Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Trump’s ally, said on Wednesday the two leaders agreed that all enriched uranium must be removed from Iran to prevent it from developing a nuclear bomb.” The Marks, as always, are doing their part. Dubowitz said Iran’s handing over all its enriched uranium, not just the highly-enriched material, was a “good red line.”
If Trump hasn’t figured this out yet, he probably never will: The Israel lobby shapes his diplomacy not to help him get the best deal possible, but to insert poison pills into the negotiations. That’s why they pushed last year for Trump to demand zero enrichment—as the former Trump official Joe Kent explained to TAC in March—and it’s why they’re now pushing him to demand that Iran ship out all its uranium.
Iran experts doubt Tehran would make this concession. “The demand that Iran hand over all of its enriched uranium to the United States is extremely unlikely to be accepted and comes very close to a red line for the Iranian system,” Toossi said.
Like a moth to the flame, Trump gravitates toward the very men who convinced him to attack Iran. He’s been promoting Levin’s lunatic rants and Thiessen’s hawkish op-eds, the White House recently added an FDD staffer to its team of Iran negotiators, and Netanyahu continues to have the president’s ear.
Considering how disastrous the Iran war has been for America’s geopolitical position and Trump’s poll numbers, might the president finally be ready to put America first, rather than let Israel dictate his Mideast policy? Sadly, I don’t see much reason to suppose he’ll pass the test this time either.
Read the full article here
