Back on March 30, President Trump said of Iran, “If they don’t make a deal. there will be bombing. It will be bombing the likes of which they have never seen before.” Fact check: TRUE.
In February, Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei declared that negotiations with America “are not intelligent, wise or honorable” and that “there should be no negotiations with such a government.” Eventually Iran agreed to talks, led by Steve “maybe I got duped by Hamas” Witkoff. That is about as advantageous a negotiating situation as the Iranians could ever want. And yet, the Iranians kept refusing every offer that the Trump administration put on the table.
Trump really loves reaching a deal that no one else could reach. If “only Nixon could go to China,” then perhaps only Trump could sign a deal with the Iranians and convince Republicans it is a good idea. And he’s not the kind of guy who gets hung up on details. First-term Trump made a huge deal about tearing up NAFTA, only to replace it with USMCA, which was “actually mostly identical to NAFTA.”
The fact that Iran has rejected the offer for direct talks reaffirms what many of us have suspected for decades: That in the end, the mullahs and the whole regime are so vehemently and inextricably hostile to the United States that no reasonable deal can ever be reached with them. All of that “death to America” chanting isn’t for show. Or perhaps now that they’ve spent more than four decades chanting that, and demonized (quite literally) America so intensely, they’ve boxed themselves in and can’t turn around and make a deal with the Great Satan, even when a good deal is on the table.
Why couldn’t Trump and Witkoff reach a deal? Because the Ayatollah didn’t want a deal, at least not one that met America’s requirements. Trump offered a deal or bombs, over and over again.
And Iran’s leaders chose bombs.