© FLICKR/WHITE HOUSEIsraeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu • US President Donald Trump • White House • April 7, 2025
Iran and the United States are set to meet indirectly today in Oman, in the hopes of finding a way to resolve their confrontations over Iran's nuclear program without resorting to an "Israeli-led" attack on Iran.
There are a lot of details to parse if these discussions are to bear fruit. It will be important to see whether each side — though most of the concern here really lays with the American side — is willing, at least in the context of these talks, to deal with realities over propaganda and pragmatism over sloganeering.
These talks are different from earlier ones. High-level officials from Donald Trump's administration are leading these talks. Trump's schizophrenic approach to policy makes negotiations volatile but also leaves open possibilities for breakthroughs.
Netanyahu sidelined
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's visit to Washington earlier this week clearly indicated the potential here. Netanyahu came with the proper fealty to Trump, kissing the proverbial ring. He desperately needed a boost from Trump as protests and scandals swirled around him in Israel. He also needed Trump to back his aggressive stance against Iran, a crucial point in ensuring the perpetual state of active war that Netanyahu needs to forestall elections next year and to continue to delay his trials in court and investigations of his administration's failures.
He got none of it.
Only hours before Netanyahu was to meet with Trump, he was told that Trump was going to hold talks with Iran to avert war. The large press conference that was scheduled for the two leaders was quickly reduced to a small group of hand-picked "journalists."
At that mini-conference, Netanyahu was clearly discomfited by Trump's mention of negotiations with Iran. It got worse for him as Trump mildly rebuked Netanyahu on his reluctance to engage with Türkiye over both countries (illegal) presences in Syria. It's worth noting how quickly Israel and Türkiye started productive talks after that.
There was a clear message that Trump was sending, although he didn't use the same kind of language that got one of his negotiators into trouble a few weeks ago: Israel is not going to drive this process. The United States is.
More precisely, Netanyahu is not going to drive the process; Trump is. Trump later clarified Israel's role. After saying that the U.S. will use a military option against Iran if necessary, Trump said:
"Israel will obviously be very much involved in that — it'll be the leader of that. But nobody leads us. We do what we want to do."Trump will allow the Israeli military to take the lead, and the risks, while he expects that the U.S. will be a full partner in the planning and strategizing of an attack, and offer the needed support while not risking backlash from Trump's own base should American military personnel be injured or killed in another "foreign war."
So Netanyahu is now reduced to trying to sabotage a diplomatic process that is out of his hands in the hope of provoking a military confrontation that he will not be able to drive but merely partner in. After four years of Joe Biden needlessly acquiescing to every Israeli desire, this is an unwelcome change for Netanyahu.
It is ironic that the Democratic administration, which claimed to defend the "rules-based order," and claimed to respect established political traditions domestically, routinely broke U.S. law and quite possibly delivered the death blow to both the "rules-based" post-Cold War order and to the international legal system; while Trump's Republican administration, which has openly defied the rule of law, has moved quickly and decisively into brutal authoritarianism and blatant racism, is restraining Israel's relentless push for a regional war, at least for the moment.
A fictional crisis
Yet, on the whole, and in their effects on the ground, Trump's policies have not been much different materially in Gaza, or even with Iran, from Biden's. And one of those similarities is the ongoing denial of the fictional basis of the Iranian "nuclear threat."
That "Iran must not be allowed to obtain a nuclear weapon" is a mantra we hear every day, and also a point that most people agree with, even if, for some of us, it is not so much about "allowing" Iran a nuke, as it is that no one should have these awful weapons and the last thing we need is another country, friend or foe, possessing them.
What is routinely absent from the conversation is that one of the people who agrees, at least for the moment, that Iran must not have a nuclear weapon is Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The fatwa (ruling under Islamic law) he issued dates back to at least 2003 and as much as a decade before that.
There are, of course, those who think the fatwa is just words and others who believe it to be deception. So, if further proof is needed, the United States has provided it.
The United States intelligence services confirmed in 2007 that Iran had formally abandoned the pursuit of nuclear weapons technology in 2003.
That intelligence assessment has been repeatedly confirmed ever since, most recently by Trump's own Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard in testimony before Congress.
She said:
"The IC (Intelligence Community) continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme Leader Khamenei has not authorized the nuclear weapons program he suspended in 2003."It can't be any clearer. Gabbard is here representing eighteen different American intelligence agencies. There has been no pushback from that entire community on her statement.
Of course, there is no shortage of bad faith actors who will say that all of this doesn't matter because Iran is evil and so every bad thing anyone thinks about them must be true.
Those forces feed off the fact that Iran has enriched uranium to near-weapons grade and always, without fail, decline to mention that they have only done that because the United States abrogated the 2015 Iran nuclear deal (called the JCPOA) and reinstated crippling sanctions and that Iran's only way to retaliate at all was to also take the steps that were denied it by the JCPOA.
Again, we need to recall that it was Donald Trump who, for no reason other than his wish to reverse any positive step by his then-immediate predecessor Barack Obama, tore up the JCPOA. He did this despite the statement by his own top aides, such as then-Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, who told a House of Representatives hearing:
"I believe that they fundamentally are (in compliance). There have been certainly some areas where they were not temporarily in that regard, but overall our intelligence community believes that they have been compliant, and the IAEA also says so."Six months later, Mattis said it again, even while Trump was getting ready to scrap the deal. He told a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing:
"I've read (the JCPOA) now three times ... and I will say that it is written almost with an assumption that Iran would try to cheat...So the verification, what is in there, is actually pretty robust as far as our 'intrusive ability' to inspect and supervise the Iranian nuclear facilities and program."This isn't just about getting history right. This is the perspective that Iran is bringing to the talks, one that is confirmed by Trump's own people when they are forced to speak the truth rather than just say whatever their boss wants them to say.
This perspective was never brought to the Biden administration's dealings with Iran, despite Biden having been fully immersed in the JCPOA talks as Obama's vice president.
If Trump wants to avoid the military conflict that he has already primed American military forces in the region for, his negotiators need to appreciate the reality that the only steps Iran has taken toward a nuclear weapon since 2003 are entirely due to the U.S.' refusal to live up to the deal it pushed for and got in 2015.
Netanyahu's Libya option
Another reality Trump needs to recognize is the message that has been sent to countries that surrender their nuclear deterrent.
Ukraine is an obvious current example. Of the many ways the West betrayed Ukraine's trust after the collapse of the Soviet Union, a big one is the neglect of Ukrainian security, particularly between 1995 and 2014, that was promised to Kyiv in exchange for their agreement to give up the Soviet nuclear weapons they possessed.
If they still had those, would Putin have invaded? We can never know, but even if he did, the entire strategic approach of both sides to the fighting would have been dramatically altered if both sides had nuclear weapons rather than only one. In general, when it comes to military power, it is best for neither side to have weapons of mass destruction, but the worst-case scenario is where only one side does.
Libya is another country that sacrificed its nuclear program, back in 2003. Though Libya was not yet close to a weapon, sacrificing the nuclear program was a way for Libya's then-leader Moammar Gaddafi to ingratiate himself with the West and, he hoped, to avoid a similar fate to that of the devastated Iraq.
That didn't work out well for Gaddafi or Libya, and the state itself remains divided and unstable to this day.
This explains some of what Gabbard was talking about when, later in her recent testimony, she said:
"In the past year, we have seen an erosion of a decades-long taboo in Iran on discussing nuclear weapons in public, likely emboldening nuclear weapons advocates within Iran's decision-making apparatus."If Iran should agree, as it did in 2015, to surrender its entire nuclear weapons program, does the same fate await it as those of Libya and Ukraine? Given that its enemies, the U.S. and Israel, both have nuclear arsenals as well as massive stores of both conventional weapons and WMDs and have wreaked unimaginable destruction around the world and in the Middle East specifically, it is a real concern, and one that the country, both in the public and governmental discourses, would be irresponsible not to discuss and consider.
This must inform the American approach to the talks in Oman. Benjamin Netanyahu is one person who knows that.
To save face, and to give the impression that what he says is going to matter to Trump, Netanyahu spoke to the issue of U.S.-Iran talks after he left Washington. He said:
"Iran will not have nuclear weapons. This can be done by agreement, but only if the agreement is a Libya-style agreement (where international and American agencies) go in, blow up the facilities, dismantle all the equipment, under American supervision with American execution. That is good."Netanyahu wants Iran's entire nuclear program destroyed, including the civilian aspect. That's a non-starter for Iran. While nuclear power accounts for only a small portion of Iran's electricity use, it is expected to grow in coming years as even more of its oil will be exported in an attempt to rebuild its shattered economy.
Anti-Iran hawks are going to push the "Libya option." Iran, for its part, will need to find the space to agree to the sort of intrusive inspections it allowed in 2015, at least, and probably some other concessions for Trump to show off. They very likely know that. And if the U.S. wants that agreement, it will need to commit to ending sanctions more reliably than it did in 2015.
That path is reasonable, it is a win for Iran, and Trump can sell it as a triumph. It's there for the taking, but only if Trump does something well outside of both his and, for the most part, the U.S.'s comfort zone: act in good faith and grounded in reality rather than myth.
Comment: It won't take long to see if Trump's thumb on Netanyahu's jugular slows the pulse for all-out war engagement with Iran...give it a day or two.