A very odd nugget from Barak Ravid of Axios. Here’s the key passage in the lede …
CIA Director John Ratcliffe told President Trump and other senior officials that intelligence gathered by U.S. intelligence agencies raised serious doubts about Iran’s willingness to make the nuclear concessions the U.S. is seeking in any final deal, according to three sources familiar with those discussions.
The way the line reads you kind of get the idea that Iran isn’t playing straight with the US or won’t follow through on their commitments. But look what it actually says. The CIA doesn’t think Iran is willing to make the concessions the US is demanding in a negotiation that hasn’t taken place yet. I think the proper response to this is … well, probably not. That’s why they haven’t agreed to it already in the almost four months they’ve been negotiating with the US. If they were willing to do that they likely would have agreed to it since it could have stopped the war at almost any time and they haven’t.
It’s true that there are cases where a party may be unwilling to agree to a condition under duress (with bombs falling) that they might be willing to not under an active threat. But this is actually something unique to the Trumpist moment, where one side in an administration dispute is going public with the information that puts the lie to the president’s ruse.
If you go to war to achieve a specific end you don’t end the war before negotiating over that specific end. (The US has many declared ends in its war with Iran – proxies, missiles, etc. – but the nuclear program was always the most central.) You come to an agreement when you’re hand is strongest. The whole point of pushing the negotiation over nuclear weapons to after the conflict but making it seem like an agreement is somehow contained within the ceasefire isn’t a matter of really poor negotiating skills. It’s a ruse that both sides – Iran and the Trump White House – are tacitly cooperating on to give Trump an out to walk away from the war without achieving any of his war aims. In other words, this isn’t Iran outwitting him. (Or they’re not outwitting his negotiators at least.) It’s Trump and Iran agreeing to bamboozle the American people (or at least Trump’s supporters) so he can avoid reckoning with the psychic reality of his defeat and the electoral repercussions of taking the country to war with close to no public support and then screwing it up royally on top of that.
For what it’s worth, there’s still a non-trivial chance this will fall apart. But Trump’s hawks know what they’re doing pushing his failure to the foreground. It may create too much psychic strain, at which point he’ll sabotage the deal.
