Iran Wants to Turn Back Time

T he Iranian military lost an unmanned drone over the Arabian Sea on Tuesday when a U.S. fighter jet shot it out of the sky. The Iranian asset “aggressively approached” the USS Abraham Lincoln with “unclear intent,” a U.S. Central Command spokesman told Fox News, but the drone continued its advance “despite de-escalatory measures taken by U.S. forces operating in international waters.”

The drone’s fate is illustrative of heightened tensions in the region: Iran’s willingness to test America’s response to provocation and the defensive posture of America’s forward-deployed naval platforms. Everyone is on edge.

But there do seem to be efforts underway designed to turn down the temperature, and those efforts are not exclusive to the increasingly desperate Iranian regime.

On Friday, the Trump administration will reportedly reengage in direct talks with Iran’s representatives, according to the Islamic Republic’s state-run news agency. To hear Iranian officials tell it, however, there’s little to discuss.

Tehran has signaled that it is unwilling to put its ballistic missile stockpiles or development programs up for negotiation. The regime has given no ground to Trump officials who are duly critical of the bloodbath that Iranian security forces executed when they slaughtered perhaps tens of thousands of demonstrators in the country’s streets in January. There are no reforms on offer, no concessions to the Western democracies that have since branded the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps and its appendages as state-sponsored terrorist entities. The regime has shown some leg when it comes to the remnants of its nuclear weapons program, but much of that program is entombed beneath many tons of lightly irradiated rubble. It is not at all clear what’s left to discuss.

Still, Trump’s negotiating team — which includes the president’s favorite real estate developer, Steve Witkoff, as well as his more accomplished son-in-law, Jared Kushner — has already rejected Iran’s demand to move the talks from Turkey to Oman. But that wasn’t Iran’s only ask.

“They also now want to hold them in a bilateral format, only with the U.S., rather than with several Arab and Muslim countries attending as observers,” Axios journalist Barak Ravid reported. Currently, ministers from Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Egypt, and the United Arab Emirates are slated to participate in talks between Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi and Trump’s envoys. In addition, “The Iranians want to limit the talks to nuclear issues and not discuss things like missiles and proxy groups that are priorities for other countries in the region.”

In other words, Tehran wants to roll back the clock and reset its relationship with the Trump administration to the status quo that prevailed before the U.S. Air Force decimated Iran’s nuclear program. As one Iranian official told the Arab media outlet Al Mayadeen, according to Jerusalem Post contributor Amichai Stein, “Tehran wants to resume the nuclear talks from the point where they were halted on the eve of the 12-day war with Israel.”

If you were the mullahs, you’d want that, too. You’d love to turn back time and, perhaps, reevaluate the wisdom of helping to plot and green-lighting the October 7 massacre. You’d probably reconsider enlisting each of your terrorist proxy armies in that fight, given the technological, military, and intelligence coups that subsequently neutralized those militias and their commanders. You’d think twice about hosting the terrorist leaders that Israel killed inside safehouses within your capital, exposing your own incompetence. You wouldn’t have launched multiple barrages of ballistic missiles against Israel, to which the Jewish state belatedly responded by all but eliminating your air defense capabilities. You’d definitely rather have your nuclear weapons program intact, but it just made far too tempting a target given all the defensive capabilities that were lost in your long, proximal fight with Israel.

But that is a fantasy. Why would the United States contribute to making the mullahs’ dream manifest?

It has been nearly a month since the president first warned the Iranian theocracy that it would face dire consequences if it slaughtered protesters in the streets. Tehran did just that, and its representatives flagrantly dismissed the president’s threats as hollow and empty as the massacre was ongoing. It was reasonable to speculate that Trump’s hand was stayed for a time by the atypical absence of a U.S. carrier group in the region — a consequence of his focus on the menace (as opposed to an imminent threat) posed by the regime in Caracas. But the offensive assets Trump needs are now in place. Whether the U.S. can field sufficient defensive assets such as missile interceptors is another question and a particularly urgent one. Still, the president has options available to him should he want to make good on his promise to the beleaguered Iranian people.

What the Iranians want is to stall, leading Witkoff and Kushner by the nose with the promise of an elusive diplomatic breakthrough looming just over the horizon. They want to use those precious hours to replenish their missile stockpiles, further crush the opposition, and perhaps secure some relief from Western sanctions. The Iranians will dangle a tantalizing but cosmetic concession or two in front of Western eyes if only to ensure that the diplomatic process continues indefinitely. Iran wins by not losing. It would be foolish for the Trump administration to play Iran’s game on Iran’s terms, but that’s what it has been doing for the better part of a month.

We now find ourselves precisely where Western policy initiatives were designed to get us. The sanctions regime, the decimation of Iran’s proxies, the neutralization of its nuclear weapons program, and the outrage in the streets aimed squarely at regime figures — all of it came about as a result of a concerted and strategic plan to destabilize the regime. Well, we got what we wanted. The final stage of this campaign is now before us. The Iranian theocracy, perhaps the most malignant regime on the planet, has never been weaker. The time to kick its rotten edifice down is now.

Update: After a confusing back and forth on Wednesday, talks between the U.S. and Iran will go ahead on Friday, and they will proceed at Iran’s preferred venue, Oman. What’s more, according to Axios’s Ravid, the administration has agreed to another Iranian demand: limiting bilateral talks to discussions only over Iran’s battered nuclear program.

U.S. officials told Axios that a variety of “Middle Eastern leaders urgently lobbied” the administration to placate the Islamic Republic. “We have told the Arabs that we will do the meeting if they insist,” one said. “But we are very skeptical.”