Yet another mid-talks attack jeopardises chances of Iran taking Trump seriously | Iran

The joint Israeli and US strike on Iran had been planned for months, but the timing amid negotiations between Iran and the US will once again raise questions about whether Washington is serious about reaching a deal with Tehran.

In June last year, Israel, with the United States on board, launched a 10-day offensive against Iran just three days before Iran and the United States met for a sixth round of talks.

Therefore, this attack, which comes in the middle of a second negotiation process, should undermine the Iranian regime’s chances of taking the US negotiation offer seriously. They were stung twice. As one Iranian Telegram channel put it: “While Iran was pursuing diplomacy, the USA attacked once again. Diplomacy with the terrorist state USA does not work once again.”

Iranian foreign minister Abbas Araghchi was acutely aware that Trump might put diplomacy aside, but thought it was a risk worth taking.

Clearly knowing what the US was planning and how imminent a US military strike was, Badr Albusaidi, the Omani foreign minister who had brokered the talks, made an urgent dash for Washington in a desperate attempt to best polish their progress. He even took the unusual step of going to CBS to reveal many of the secrets of the deal taking shape. He said a peace agreement was within reach.

But Albusaidi was only allowed to meet with vice president J.D. Vance to establish that talks were on the verge of a breakthrough. He said the deal would be much better than the 2015 agreement, which Trump abandoned in 2018.

He claimed that Iran had agreed to zero out its highly enriched uranium stockpile, down-blending of the existing highly enriched uranium stockpile within Iran, and full verification access to the International Atomic Energy Agency. He said that US weapons inspectors, as well as inspectors from the IAEA UN body, could be allowed to enter Iran. Iran would enrich only what it needed for its civilian nuclear program. A final agreement on the principles could be signed this week, and details on how the verification system will work could take another three months.

There was little or nothing offered on human rights, Iran’s ballistic missile program, or its support for proxies in the region.

From Iran’s perspective, the 1,250-mile (2,000 km) range of its ballistic missiles could be discussed in talks with the Gulf Cooperation Council, but the missiles were in principle part of Iran’s defense and, as the joint US-Israeli strike demonstrated, central to Iranian national security.

Previous Iranian foreign minister Javad Zarif had always defended the missiles, noting how vulnerable Iran was during the Iran-Iraq war. He suggested that Iran would have less need for its own missile program if the United States stopped selling weapons to the Gulf.

However, this was neither an agenda nor a schedule suitable for Trump. Indeed, his special envoy, Steve Witkoff, said Trump was surprised Iran had not yet surrendered, hinting at what the president wanted.

In justifying the attack, Trump did not address the course of the talks or the gaps that existed between the two sides. He simply said: “Iran’s threatening activities put the United States, its forces and bases abroad, and our allies around the world at risk.”

There will soon be a debate in the United States about whether Albusaidi’s assessment of the productivity of the talks is justified. Low levels of requirement-based enrichment and the elimination of highly enriched stockpiles (if indeed offered by Iran), as well as verification, would ostensibly deprive Iran of the ability to make a bomb. If so, Trump, encouraged by Israel and Republican hawks, would be accused of willfully rejecting a deal that would peacefully end the threat Iran’s nuclear program has posed over the past 30 years. Others will argue that the continuation of the incorrigible and oppressive Iranian regime is itself a threat to world security.

What is extraordinary in both cases is that before the attacks, Trump made virtually no attempt to explain or justify his actions or goals to the American people, Congress, or his allies.