By Jim Geraghty
Friday, June 13, 2025
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.
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