Trump's Childish, Erratic, and Dangerous "Strategy"on Iran's Nukes

No, it's not four dimensional chess. It's a breathtaking failure of focus and leadership where focus and leadership are desperately needed.

The President’s foremost duty is to secure the physical safety of the country. Right now, the main threat is not Russia’s belligerence in Europe or China’s aggressiveness in Asia. It’s the ongoing and determined nuclear weapons program by terrorist warmongers in Iran. This has been going on for decades, since Jimmy Carter caved in to jihad.

President Trump has known about it in a serious way from at least the time he was elected in 2016. That was nine years ago. Have the mullahs become more peaceful or better-intentioned since then? Not even the bonkers Left thinks so.

Just in the last few days, as Trump raises his tariffs then lowers them then raises them again, this is what his Administration’s Iran “plan” has been. From the Jewish Insider:

There’s an ongoing parlor game in Washington: Trying to figure out President Donald Trump’s Iran policy. More specifically, trying to decipher his endgame for ongoing nuclear negotiations with Iran, which are set to enter their fourth round in Oman this weekend.

Does Trump support allowing Iran to enrich uranium at a low level, as Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff said last month, before he walked that position back [the next afternoon]? Will he seek a “total dismantlement” of Iran’s nuclear program, as he told “Meet the Press” last weekend? Or will he allow Iran to have a “civil nuclear program,” as Vice President JD Vance said on Wednesday, by importing enriched material from abroad (as Secretary of State Marco Rubio has stated)?

Let me add right here that anyone who seriously believes Iran will ever settle for a “civil nuclear program” is living in fantasyland. To paraphrase Michael Corleone, if we know anything, if history has taught us anything, it’s that any Iranian nuclear program is a nuclear weapons program. Sure it will get hidden, sort of, and some farcical UN inspector will say that he believes Iran’s claims, but the relentlessly enriched uranium is not going to care what fairy tales are being told about it.

Trump offered the latest clue to Iran watchers on Wednesday afternoon. Or, more accurately, he pretty much shut down the entire game — because trying to guess what the Trump administration wants is a fool’s errand if Trump himself has not made up his mind.

“We haven't made that decision yet,” Trump said in the West Wing on Wednesday when asked by a reporter whether it is Washington’s position that Iran can maintain an enrichment program as long as it doesn’t enrich uranium to weapons-grade levels. “We will, but we haven't made that decision yet.”

After more than forty years of “death to America” and bloody world-wide terrorism, we “haven’t made a decision yet”? That might conceivably be expected (but still unacceptable) from a senile Joe Biden. But from Trump? Is this what his supporters voted for? And more to the point, is indecision in the face of overwhelming evidence of Iran’s malign intentions consistent with America’s security? This is to leave to one side for the moment the mind-bending daily shifts in the announcements of what our policy supposedly is.

What’s particularly striking is that Trump's comment came hours after he seemed to suggest something different to radio host Hugh Hewitt, saying the only options are to “blow them up nicely or blow them up viciously,” apparently referring to Iran’s nuclear program.

That’s the Trump his backers voted for. It’s also what the peace of the world demands, since the Mideast nuclear arms race will start in deadly earnest two minutes after Iran’s possession of a nuclear bomb gets confirmed.

The 2015 Iran nuclear deal, negotiated by the Obama administration, allowed Iran to continue enriching uranium at a low level, rather than forcing the Islamic Republic to give up its nuclear program entirely. This was one of the key reasons foreign policy hawks opposed the deal so strongly — including Trump, who pulled out of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action in 2018. But the regional landscape has changed since then. Iran is weaker, but it is also bolder.

And probably more desperate, while certainly no less dishonest.

“Even if you agreed with the JCPOA, you have to note that Iran is different today, and it's different because it's now a country that will directly attack Israel, and it's now a country that will directly try to kill American presidents,” said William Wechsler, director of the Rafik Hariri Center and Middle East Programs at the Atlantic Council.

Dan Shapiro, the former U.S. ambassador to Israel who worked on Iran policy at the Pentagon in the Biden administration, said Trump administration officials shouldn’t negotiate in public.

Of course, we shouldn’t negotiate at all, for two perfectly obvious reasons. First, anything recognizable as serious negotiation presupposes the ability and willingness of the other party to abide by what gets agreed to. In this case, that’s arrant nonsense. You can rely on the willingness of Iran to keep its word to exactly the same extent you can rely on a shark to keep its.

Second, Trump’s much-hyped brilliance as a negotiator is ironically (or perhaps comically, if the circumstances weren’t so dire) debunked precisely by his announcing his strong desire for a deal. It’s obvious to a middle school kid that the best way to get any kind of deal worth having is by disclaiming, not embracing, the idea that you want one, and instead letting it be known, vividly and by your acts, that troubling yourself with negotiating is at best an annoyance: You have the strength and will to take what you want anyway, and you’re inclined to use it right quick if the other side doesn’t get its mind right.

In the Iran context, that would mean, say, sinking a few of their military ships, bombing a few of their oil fields, and assassinating a few more of their generals — then wait for them to seek talks.

Trump cannot help knowing this. But from the almost daily vacillation we’ve seen so far, you’d never know it. And much, much worse, the mullahs won’t know it either.