Trump, Israel have Iran leaders shaking in their boots

Nearly 20 years ago, Henry Kissinger established the rules for decoding the push and pull of Iran’s foreign policy. Iran, Kissinger famously said, had to decide whether it is “a country or a cause.”

His challenge revolved around the question of whether the ayatollah and his government were pragmatic in dealing with other nations, or militarily fanatical in a quest to spread their Islamic revolution. 

The ensuing years of regional terrorism, threats of war against America, Israel and Arab nations and oppression at home provide mountains of evidence that Iran is not interested in normal statecraft. 

Indeed, the history is so one-sided that the current despot, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, doesn’t even pretend to be concerned about anything other than Islamic supremacy. 

Yet much of the world, including recent American presidents and the usual suspects in Europe and the United Nations, have found it convenient to assert that the answer to Kissinger’s challenge remains elusive.

Nuclear option

Fortunately, America now has a president who is calling B.S. on claims that Iran is anything but a terror state. 

Most important, Donald Trump is prepared to end the charade once and for all. 

His public position is that Iran cannot be allowed to obtain a nuclear weapon.

That’s dramatic in itself, but his private bottom line is even more so. 

Revealed here for the first time, Trump’s position is that Iran’s leaders either destroy their nuclear facilities, or the US, likely with Israel’s help, will do it for them by taking military action. 

That’s his offer, and no other options are on the table, the president tells confidants. Certainly there will be no more agreements requiring international inspections that rely on Iranian honesty and compliance.

Nor will there be any tolerance for Iran’s enriching uranium at levels that have no use other than nuclear bombs.

The unicorn fantasy that Iran would use its enriched uranium for domestic energy only is a dead letter to this president. 

His approach dramatically heightens the stakes for the talks that began Saturday in Oman. 

That Iran was even willing to engage the US is a testament to the clarity of Trump’s resolve and willingness to use force if necessary.

As he said in late March about Iran’s leaders, “If they don’t make a deal, there will be bombing . . . the likes of which they have never seen before.”

To underscore the point, the US is using B-2 stealth bombers to attack Iran’s terror proxy in Yemen, the Houthis. The weapons of choice are 30,000-pound bunker-buster bombs, the most powerful non-nuclear weapon in our arsenal. 

Those bombers and weapons already are within reach of Iran and likely would be used in any military action against its nuke facilities, the most important of which are embedded in mountains.

The contrast with Trump’s immediate predecessors, Barack Obama and Joe Biden, is striking. They begged and pleaded with Iran for peace, offered obscene treaty terms, lifted oil and banking sanctions, ransomed hostages and further sweetened their offers with pallets of cash. 

For the Iranian people suffering under a corrupt, despotic theocracy, they offered pity but no help.

Their efforts fell flat. Even worse, Washington was forced to admit that Iran actually used some of the freed money to sponsor regional terrorists against Israel and our Arab allies. 

Forced to negotiate

The good news so far is that Iran’s recent behavior reflects that it remembers Trump’s first term and realizes he’s cut from a different cloth than Obama and Biden. 

He famously withdrew from the flimsy Obama accord, which Tehran had refused even to sign as a show of disdain for America. 

More important to the mullahs, Trump ordered the 2020 drone strike that killed Gen. Qasem Soleimani, the head of the Quds Force, which spearheads the Iranian terror network. 

That led the government to put out assassination contracts on Trump and others in his first-term Cabinet who were involved in the planning and execution of the Soleimani strike. 

Fortunately, none has succeeded.

Still, the lingering hostility led Iran to initially scoff at the idea of new negotiations, saying there was nothing to discuss. Practically overnight, however, it flip-flopped and agreed to meet. 

At first, it insisted on indirect talks, meaning each side would speak through a mediator. 

Trump said that was not how it was going to work, and Saturday’s session ended with his special envoy, Steve Witkoff, talking directly with Iran Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi. 

They agreed to meet again next week, with Araghchi telling Iranian media the talks were “productive” and the atmosphere “positive.” 

Whether the tone holds depends on whether Iranian leaders take seriously Trump’s threat to use force.

They would be suicidal not to. 

One fact in the president’s favor is that the Ayatollah and his government are at one of their weakest points in decades and cannot afford to expand their Islamic revolution. 

Thanks largely to Israel, they don’t have the sacrificial stooges of the kind who made up Hezbollah, Hamas and other goon squads. 

Indeed, Iran’s web of terror armies is in tatters, and the long goal of eliminating Israel first and moving on to America looks more and more like an expired fantasy. 

Although the government still has a brutal, suffocating hold on the Iranian people, there are reports that officials realize they could be toppled.

A provocative piece in Foreign Policy magazine asks whether Iran’s regime is “About to Go the Way of Syria’s?” because many former core supporters no longer trust it to provide economic and national security.

Deal’s make or break

Similarly, The New York Times reports that Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was persuaded to accept Trump’s invitation for talks because he was told by advisers that, otherwise, the regime could fall.

The Times cited a crashing economy, a sinking currency and shortages of gas, electricity and water as causes of growing public discontent. 

War with the US and Israel could be the final nail in the coffin, the officials supposedly warned the Supreme Leader. 

The Times said Iranian officials also told him that if Iran refused talks or if the negotiations failed, Trump was sure to deliver military strikes against the main nuclear sites.

The Times, of course, couldn’t bring itself to admit that Trump’s hard line was already bearing more fruit than anything Obama and Biden tried. 

Nor could it admit that Israel’s war against Hamas and Hezbollah was a major factor in Iran’s weakness. To do so would undercut its drumbeat of criticism of the Jewish state for its military actions in Gaza.

Instead, the paper quotes Iran’s former nuclear negotiator as declaring that Khamenei would never agree to dismantling its nuclear program and that such a demand would be a “deal breaker.”

Perhaps, but because Trump is making precisely that demand, one side or the other has to blink. 

My bet is that it won’t be the man in the White House.