Republicans Are Getting Duly Nervous over Trump’s Iran Nuclear Deal

By Noah Rothman

Monday, April 21, 2025

 

The Iranian regime is enjoying the air of legitimacy granted to it by the Trump administration’s sudden pivot to direct talks with Tehran over its nuclear program. If Steve Witkoff can sit down with Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, why can’t American think tanks do the same? Doesn’t the public in an open society have a compelling interest in learning what its adversary has planned for it? It’s a debatable premise. For its part, the Carnegie Endowment for Peace concluded that it could and should press Araghchi to expand on the Iranian regime’s goals in ongoing nuclear talks.

 

But Jeb Bush was having none of it:

It’s a good point, and it won the day. On Monday, citing unexpected demands from the Iranians that would have scuttled the host’s preferred format, the Carnegie Endowment abruptly canceled Araghchi’s appearance. Whether the impasse was genuine or pretextual, Carnegie saved face.

 

The think tank’s confusion was, however, understandable. Is the Islamic Republic a terrorist regime that should be shunned by the civilized world? Or is it a rational actor on the world stage that can be nudged into responsible participation in the global economy and international institutions? The Trump administration’s ongoing nuclear talks created this confusion, and Bush isn’t the only Republican luminary who is leery of both this process and the outcomes it appears set to produce.

 

Writing in the pro-Trump journal American Greatness, Fred Fleitz — the co-author of a cease-fire proposal for Russia’s war in Ukraine alongside the president’s hand-selected envoy to that conflict — recently sounded the alarm over the bad advice that Trump may be getting. He assailed the American intelligence community for its commitment to a 2007 assessment concluding that Iran’s uranium-enrichment program is peaceful in nature, and he called on Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard to ditch the assessment. “Red flags are everywhere,” warned radio host Mark Levin, citing Fleitz’s admonition. “Can’t say we’ve not been warned.”

 

But Trump’s onetime United Nations ambassador, Nikki Haley, was unconvinced that Gabbard can be deemed a passive participant in the effort to guide the United States into a new nuclear accord with Iran. “I raised alarm bells about this when she was nominated but you chose to attack me over it anyway,” she wrote in response to Levin’s disquiet. “There is no room for Iranian sympathizers in the national security team of the U.S.”

 

Haley’s agitation is well grounded. “Obama 2.0,” she wrote in response to a report via the Institute for the Study of War, which concluded that the terms of the deal being pursued by Trump officials “would likely preserve Iran’s ability to rapidly rebuild its nuclear program.”

 

The Trump administration’s Republican critics indeed have reason to worry that the president is adopting Obama’s framework for the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA): the administration dropped its objection to any Iranian uranium enrichment while sidestepping Tehran’s ballistic missile program and its support for terrorist organizations. From Iran’s perspective, the talks “are seen as a major diplomatic win,” Israel Hayom reported. The language being used “suggests that the Americans have, at least for now, abandoned several of the fundamental demands that were emphasized before negotiations began.”

 

Haley isn’t the only former Trump official sounding alarm bells. “President Trump is pursuing a deal with Iran while it is at its weakest strategic point in decades,” Trump’s former secretary of state and CIA chief, Mike Pompeo, wrote for the Free Press. Trump’s onetime chief diplomat savaged the “isolationists on the right” who have uncritically adopted the binary preferred by Iran’s defenders: either there will be a deal that preserves Iranian enrichment capabilities or there will be a catastrophic war. “This is propaganda,” Pompeo declared. “It is a false choice propagated by those who would prefer to coddle the regime in Tehran and cut a deal that will ensure that Iran obtains a full-on nuclear weapons program over time.”

 

The MAGA movement will have a hard time relegating Fleitz and Levin to their growing enemies list, but Pompeo’s and Haley’s previous critiques of the president render them easier to ignore. The same cannot be said of Republicans in Congress, who remain stalwart Trump allies but who are now vocally hostile toward the administration’s diplomatic overtures.

 

“Anyone urging Trump to enter into another Obama Iran deal is giving the President terrible advice,” Senator Ted Cruz declared. Senator Tom Cotton agreed: “As President Trump said, the only solution is Iran completely dismantling its program, or we should do it for them.” And Senator Lindsey Graham went further, sounding an apocalyptic note: “Those who minimize the risk of this regime are dead wrong,” he told Fox News Channel’s Sean Hannity. “They have enough highly enriched uranium to make six bombs. They will use it. They will kill Israel. They’ll come after us.”

 

These Republicans cannot be faulted for inconsistency. For a decade now, the GOP has opposed Obama’s JCPOA framework, undermined it by refusing to grant it congressional imprimatur, and vowed to block any effort to bring it back from the dead.

 

In 2022, amid the Biden administration’s failed effort to produce a new nuclear deal, 49 of 50 Republican senators promised to do everything in their power to scuttle a deal that doesn’t “completely block” Iran’s pathway to a bomb, constrain its missile program, and “confront Iran’s support for terrorism.”

 

Asked last year how she would respond if Kamala Harris won the election and set out to conclude the work Biden began, Representative Elise Stefanik, soon to become Trump’s first pick to lead the U.S. mission at the U.N., pledged to “block that at every turn.”

 

In January, Joe Wilson, House Foreign Affairs Committee senior member and former chair of the Republican Study Committee’s national security task force, sent an open letter to his conference’s leadership advocating congressional action to codify Trump’s “Maximum Pressure campaign on Iran” in statute. “Countering Iran must be a Republican legislative priority,” he wrote.

 

Within this chorus of Republican voices are wildly divergent perspectives on Donald Trump, the man. But these voices are consistent in their apprehension toward the agreement that Trump’s negotiators are entertaining. Indeed, given the empirical political risks associated with opposing Trump’s initiatives, this outpouring of Republican unease is even more indicative of the risks the GOP believes Trump is inviting. And if agitated social media posts fail to move the president, Republicans are on record promising to use the power they hold in reserve to check him. The prospect of open political conflict with the head of their party is surely a scary one for career-minded Republicans, but perhaps not scarier than an Iranian nuclear breakout.