The president’s Middle East envoy has repudiated the idea that the U.S. might be open to a reasonable compromise with Iran:
United States special envoy Steve Witkoff has said that Tehran “must stop and eliminate” its nuclear enrichment programme to reach a deal with Washington, seemingly raising the bar of US demands ahead of another round of talks with Iranian officials.
Witkoff’s remarks on Tuesday appear to contradict his suggestion a day earlier that the US would be satisfied with Iran enriching uranium at a low level to produce energy.
Witkoff is restating the extreme and unrealistic demand that the administration has been making for weeks. Nothing has been added to the president’s earlier ultimatum. It is the same brain-dead maximalism that we have seen on display from Trump and his advisers for years. There have been some hints that Witkoff was open to talking about a nonproliferation agreement not so different from the original nuclear deal, but the White House has given him no support when he says things like this. Iran hawks are predictably pleased that Witkoff has been forced to fall in line.
Trump’s envoy has the unenviable job of being sent to go through the motions of negotiations when his boss has no interest in real diplomacy. No matter how well or how poorly the indirect “talks” go between the U.S. and Iranian teams, there is nothing that the negotiators can do to get around the fact that the American position is absurd. Telling Iran that is has to “stop and eliminate” enrichment is an open admission that the Trump administration doesn’t want diplomacy to succeed and it never did.
Some of the reporting this week claims that the administration is sending “mixed messages” on what it wants from Iran, but aside from occasional stray remarks from Witkoff the message from Washington has been consistent and terrible. If anyone is confused about what the administration is really after, that is the result of ignoring what Trump and his allies have said and done for the last three months. The president has made some very clear and disturbing threats: unless Iran yields to a far-reaching ultimatum that requires sweeping concessions, the U.S. will attack them. That is deranged and illegal, but it isn’t confusing.
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Daniel Larison is a contributing editor for Antiwar.com and maintains his own site at Eunomia. He is former senior editor at The American Conservative. He has been published in the New York Times Book Review, Dallas Morning News, World Politics Review, Politico Magazine, Orthodox Life, Front Porch Republic, The American Scene, and Culture11, and was a columnist for The Week. He holds a PhD in history from the University of Chicago, and resides in Lancaster, PA. Follow him on Twitter.
