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Notes -
No peace deal with Iran
Can I just point out that 21 hours seems too short for negotiations? I don't think the talks were done in earnest, at all. The 150-page JCPOA took almost 2 years of frivolous negotiations and lasted just as long. A 21 hour session in the middle of an active conflict is not very likely to reach a better equilibrium that both parties are happy with. Iran carried bloodstained schoolbags of kids killed in the Minab strike on the flight to Pakistan, they were certainly not there to surrender. I suspect the administration (or at least Vance) already knew this, and deliberately structured one-sided terms intended to be rejected so Trump can attempt building political scaffolding for escalation and blame Iran ("Look, we offered Iran a peace deal and they chose not to accept it"). Meanwhile, the Israelis have been busy!
Between accepting one of the greatest strategic defeats in decades, and trying to prosecute a horrific war amidst historic energy and food prices, we remain stuck with the latter.
Why? These things are usually drawn out because America and Iran don’t negotiate directly and pass everything through intermediaries. And by Trump’s account they agreed essentially on every point except for the nuclear question. I don’t see why it would take longer than 21 hours to realize that, the idea that negotiating is this special activity that takes lots of expertise is a myth from the Georgetown school of foreign policy to promote the need for bureaucrat-scholars to run everything.
The leading theory on this forum a week ago was that Trump was losing so badly he would accept any peace deal as long as it was face-saving and he could declare victory. Not so?
America totally destroyed Iran’s military in a stunning lopsided victory. I’ve been told this was only a tactical victory because Iran now controls the straits and is using that as leverage, but, weirdly, Trump is now announcing a blockade of the straits himself. Perhaps America isn’t defeated?
I fear that denying this will have me marked as some kind of rabid Trump fanboy who can’t deal with reality but I have to point out that oil was much higher during the 2008 crisis, back when the same dollars were worth more.
To believe in US defeat you have to believe the US is so squeamish that we'll beg Iran to re-open the SOH and in exchange offer to let them build nuclear weapons with impunity.
Stabilizing the strait may be costlier than we would like and somehow we'll do this public good alone, as usual, but not as costly as letting Iran have nukes.
Iran didn't have nukes before the war despite Netanyahu claiming the bomb is weeks away since the 90s. Currently 20% of the world's oil, several decently sized economies that invest heavily in the US, a large portion of global LNG, and 35% of the world's helium are under blockade. This is in order to fight a war to go back to the way things were two months ago.
Had Iran even wanted nukes if it wasn't for the constant threat of American war? The US needs to fight the enemies while the constant war creates the enemies.
This war could easily end up dragging on for an extended period of time. Nobody enters a war thinking the war will last for many years yet wars often do. The US could easily be stuck in a quagmire that drags on and becomes a story that never stops giving.
So if Iran doesn't want nukes then why is giving up enrichment such a deal breaker for them? They'd rather apparently be all killed than negotiate on this.
They do want nukes. No matter what one's opinion about the war is, and mine is against it, the fact is that they clearly want nukes. They would be insane not to want nukes. Having nukes is just better in almost every way than not having nukes, if you can afford the high price tag of building and maintaining them. For Iran's government nukes are the only possible way of guaranteeing their system's survival, other than a Russian or Chinese commitment to defend them in case of war, which does not seem to be forthcoming.
If its so clear Iran wants nukes (I agree). Why do none of the countries who, allegedly are parties to nonproliferation agreements, except the US do jack shit about it?
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I don't think this is the case based off of the game theory of nuclear weapons - the rational response to a country with significant interest in tremendously harming the West nuclearizing is to turn the entire country into glass regardless of casualties the minute it becomes obvious they'll nuclearize. The threat is too severe.
In real life the anti-nuclear taboo would prevent this from happening, but the moment Iran steps out of line the response would immense and civilization ending with tens of millions dead.
We barely made it out of the Cold War and that's with both countries not wanting to use nukes and both countries mostly believing that the opponent didn't want to use nukes (even if for no other reason than nukes = death for everybody).
But Iran wants to use nukes! Some people in the government might not even care if they get away with it because of the religious extremism.
The odds of everybody in the country dying are basically zero in the pre-nuke state. Hopefully the odds would be not great, but you'd have a very real chance of tens of millions of causalities post-nuke.
Having nukes would present at tremendous risk both to the people and the government.
Now, the government likely is totally fine with risking the entire population to persevere itself.
That's a pretty good indication to justify wiping out the Iranian government.
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If you believe the Omani negotiator, Iran was willing to give up their stockpile and enrichment in exchange for sanction relief; that was likely the point of building the stockpile in the first place. Once the US tried to regime change them, the calculations shifted.
All the sources I have seen say the opposite - the negotiations leading up to military action was basically the US begging Iran to just give up on the nukes and Iran saying, "Nope, I'd rather die."
Laurence Norman, WSJ reporter in Germany, says, "My understanding comes from non-U.S. officials close to the talks as well as what Washington has said. This is what we have from 3 people."
I don't know why there are two such diametrically opposed narratives. I don't think there is any reason to believe the WSJ, which tends to be center left in the US, would try to run propaganda for Trump. I don't know what reason Oman might have to lie, except perhaps to increase their importance by making it sound like negotiations were going well.
Given Iran's past behavior regarding nuclear enrichment, I tend to believe the WSJ story as it is more in line with their past and present actions.
They agreed to 3.67% enrichment and then the US ripped it up; thus, ask for more next time. If you look at a graph of SWUs (ie effort/time input) versus enrichment percentage, it's not that huge a leap; the first few percentage points of enrichment are the hardest.
No, they didn't. The US offered to supply enriched uranium to Iran that is suitable for civilian use, a situaon similar to the UAE and Korea (two other nations that for various reasons have forfeited their ability to enrich fuel but still employ civilian nuclear programs). Iran rejected this - they want to be able to enrich their own.
Oman said, "Zero accumulation" which might be a trick of language. There is 0 accumulation if it all goes back into centrifuges. According to three other sources Iran had a 10 year nuclear enrichment plan which included:
Everything keeps coming back to the idea that Iran completely misread how serious Washington is being when they say, "No Nuclear Enrichment."
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If they just wanted to get out of the sanctions surely they could have at any point just said "hey, actually we would like to be more like Saudi Arabia, we will stop funding proxies and be chill" and any of the previous presidents would have tripped over themselves to get this deal.
Past precedent suggests that unilateral disarmament ends in your regime winding up like that of Gaddafi, not Saudi Arabia.
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Which shows that they value having proxies over having nuclear weapons. Ultimately, trying to get nukes has been more trouble than it's worth for the Iranians; Israel can't invade them, the US pre-Trump wasn't interested, and it just led to a whole bunch of crippling sanctions. Khameini issued a fatwa against nuclear weapons which, presumably, meant something in a very fundamentalist society.
The sanctions surely would have come about in response to the proxy funding in some non-nuclear counterfactual. Maybe lesser sanctions. At the end of the day the idea that Iran would have been satisfied with being a normal country that gets rich with its combination of obviously smart population and natural resources is complicated by the fact that this option was always on the table and they turned it down. The regime has ambitions in the region, and lofty ones. And once you have lofty ambitions counter to a nuclear power's wishes then you need nukes or you fail somewhere in the escalation chain above where sanctions are involved. Needing to at least be able to threaten to have nukes is a a necessary component of any plan to accomplish their regional objectives, no way around it.
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