How Iran Trying to Punk President Trump on a Deal Went Terribly Wrong, and Why No One Should Try It

Even though President Trump withdrew from the ill-considered, if not outright treasonous, Obama-negotiated Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, otherwise known as the Iran Nuclear Deal, in his first term (see There Is a "Plan B" After Cancelling the Iran Deal but Even If There Weren't It Wouldn't Matter – RedState), one of the first things he did after his inauguration was to restart negotiations with Iran. Communications were opened, using the good offices of the Sultan of Oman. The U.S. demands were the same as they were when negotiations finally broke down: Iran's nuclear program must be terminated, a curb must be placed on Iran's ballistic missile program, and Iran must stop funding terrorist groups such as Lebanese Hezbollah. 

There were four rounds of mediated talks ending on May 11, 2025, and an Iranian rejection of any limits on uranium enrichment. This precipitated Operation Midnight Hammer.

As the build-up took shape, negotiations resumed on February 6. This round produced nothing and led us to where we are today. 

A look at Iran's negotiating strategy reveals that its purpose was never to reach an agreement but rather to freeze U.S. actions and perhaps get the U.S. sufficiently invested in the process that it would agree just to get an agreement. After all, it worked with the last Nobel Peace Prize recipient to occupy the White House.

Marc Caputo, the White House reporter for Axios, has a revealing X post on how the negotiations unraveled from the perspective of the White House. The thread is lengthy and image-heavy, so I'm not going to embed it, but I encourage you to read the whole thing.

To answer Iran's professed need for enriched uranium for civilian purposes, Trump's team offered Iran as much nuclear fuel as it needed for as long as it needed it, for free if it would give up its nuclear program.

President Trump moved his military resources to the region and did it very overtly to show that he was playing a strong hand. And we communicated to them that this was something that would occur if we did not see real progress on a real deal very quickly. So in that context, we approached with a very, very strong hand, and were very explicit about that, hoping to get the real offer out of them to see if it was possible. 

Basically, there's several elements that ... showed us that there was no seriousness to achieve a real deal, and that was what we felt after the negotiations. 

One of the things I'll talk about is we went through why they needed enrichment capabilities, what they needed fuel for. Their claim, which is that it was for civil abilities —we said 'okay, there's many countries that have safe civil nuclear programs. Let's come up with a real guardrail and framework that mimic those countries. And not only will we be able to do a deal with you on that basis, we'll also help subsidize it.' 

One of the things we offered them was, we said, 'we will give you free nuclear fuel forever.' And they basically said that didn't work for them. They needed to enrich uranium. And we basically said, 'well, that that makes absolutely no sense.' And so they agreed for a short period of time to not do enrichment, basically ... But the fact that they weren't willing to take free nuclear fuel was a big tell to us that that they were looking to buy time while they're weak and to get to a place where they, over time, can enrich. 

Astonishingly, Iran demanded nuclear concessions that went beyond the JCPOA. It wanted to use advanced IR-6 centrifuges, and more of them than the 5,060 IR-1 centrifuges allowed by Obama's agreement (all you want to know about centrifuges is here). They wanted to enrich to 20% U²³⁵ rather than the 3.67% in the Obama agreement.

Here's, a point that I think is critical: un-attacked in the Midnight Hammer attack was the Tehran Research Reactor, which, in theory, is a research reactor that needs 20% enrichment protocols in order to build radio isotopes to make medicines and do agricultural research. Everybody had always thought that they were operating in a correct way at Tehran Research Reactor. 

Turns out, that we have now gotten information from the IAEA that never once did they use any of the fissionable material there to make even a single medicine. They had a couple of experiments, but it was all designed to deceive what they were really doing. They were manufacturing 20% fissionable material in Isfahan, claiming it was being sent to TRR to perform this research, when in fact it was being stockpiled. 

Now, why would you do that? Because 20% fissionable material is a very short way away from 90% fissionable material, particularly when you have IR-6 centrifuges working for you. And that baseline —not starting at 3.67, which of course was the ,ICP0A baseline— using 20% allowed them to leap forward and stockpile material that ultimately amounted to 450 roughly kilograms of 60% material. Technically, that 60% material would only be one week away from getting to 90% weapons grade. 

These are all violations of not just these protocols they lived under, but also what we demanded after Operation Midnight Hammer. And I can tell you that for every one of the three violations I just gave you which are egregious, we've got five more. So lots of problems here. 

Essentially, Iran's position was to demand that its violations of the JCPOA rules it was allegedly following be legitimized.

That was the state of play as of Thursday, and at this point Steve Witkoff decided he'd had enough.

As the U.S. delegation laid out its position that Iran couldn’t enrich uranium for the next 10 years, the Iranian side balked, said a senior Trump administration official who described the meeting on condition of anonymity.

Iran has an “inalienable right” to enrich uranium, Abbas Araghchi, the Iranian foreign minister, told the Americans. And the U.S. has an “inalienable right” to stop you, Steve Witkoff, a member of the U.S. delegation, replied.

After having heard the U.S. demands, Araghchi started yelling at Witkoff, who was accompanied at the meeting by President Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, among others, said the senior official.

“If you prefer, I can leave,” Witkoff said.

Araghchi’s representatives didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Afterward, the American delegation reported back to Trump what had happened. Trump was “nonplussed,” the senior official said.

By Saturday morning, the U.S. was at war.

There was a lot more to the start of the war than this, but that's another post.

I've frequently criticized President Trump for, in my judgment, being overly fixated on making a deal without paying much attention to what the deal entails. I understand the "win-win" mantra as well as the next guy, but I also believe there is a time and place to heed the words attributed to Genghis Khan: "The greatest happiness is to scatter your enemy, to drive him before you, to see his cities reduced to ashes, to see those who love him shrouded in tears, and to gather into your bosom his wives and daughters."

In this case, he was dealing with a criminal regime dealing in bad faith. Instead of avoiding war, Iran seemed convinced that it could wear Trump down and punk him with a deal that would publicly humiliate him. In short, they made exactly the same mistake that Nicolas Maduro made. Yes, Trump loves him some deal-makin'. But what he hates worse than coming up short in a deal is being treated like somebody's punk. Both Maduro and Iran received months of advance notice to amend their ways. They both decided they could string Trump along until the political winds shifted. Both were wrong.

For decades, former presidents have been all talk and no action. Now, Donald Trump is eliminating the threat from Iran once and for all.

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