Trump’s ‘new, reasonable’ Iran is neither new nor reasonable, and he knows it |
This Editor’s Note was sent out earlier Tuesday in ToI’s weekly update email to members of the Times of Israel Community. To receive these Editor’s Notes as they’re released, join the ToI Community here.
There is a blatant contradiction between US President Donald Trump’s repeated insistence, on the one hand, that the war against Iran has achieved “regime change” and he is now negotiating with new, “much more reasonable leaders,” and his simultaneous acknowledgement, on the other, that any Iranian who dares to take to the streets faces an immediate death sentence.
“Well, they should do it,” he said at his White House press conference on Monday, when asked whether the Iranian public should try anew to rise up against its oppressors. “But, again, the consequences are great… I mean, they were told, ‘If you protest, you will be shot immediately.'”
The same goes for his simultaneous contention, also expounded at Monday’s press conference, that the purportedly new regime is “not as radicalized” as its predecessor, but that, nonetheless, “Israel will be gone, the Middle East will be gone,” if Iran gets the bomb.
The fact is that the “new” faces of Iran are just like the “old” faces — except newly aware of their immense potential to extort the world via control over the Strait of Hormuz, and more aware, too, that nuclear weapons would make them broadly invincible.
What that underlines, in turn, is the imperative to close down the Islamic Republic’s pathways to the bomb as hermetically as possible.
Along with the tactical successes of a war now in its sixth week — the targeting of key leaders, commanders and nuclear scientists, of military facilities, of military-related industries — have come a series of disappointments and surprises: Iran has fired potent missiles, with longer ranges and a mix of devastating warheads, at far more diverse targets than expected; it has managed to keep on firing despite the relentless strikes on its launchers and stocks; a hoped-for Kurdish invasion failed to materialize; and US allies, in the region and beyond, did not join the fight, even after some of them were........