It seems as though President Donald Trump wakes up every morning and checks the calendar. If the date is an odd number he threatens Iran with bombing if the Islamic Republic does not dismantle its nuclear enrichment facilities and abandon its ballistic missile production.
On even days, the president makes an optimistic statement or post about the likelihood of a deal that accomplishes meaningful, verifiable and rapid disarmament by Iran of its nuclear and missile programs.
Trump is, of course, negotiating with the mullahs via the open-source yo-yo of statements. The effect on friends of Israel is, however, disconcerting. They can only remember the betrayal of Israel that was President Obama’s and then Secretary of State John Kerry’s “Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action” (“JCPOA”). The JCPOA was agreed to July 14, 2015 by the P5+1 —China, France, Germany, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States), the European Union (EU), and Iran, a plan that purported to guarantee that Iran’s nuclear program will be exclusively peaceful.
The JCPOA was, according to Trump and many others, the “worst deal in history,” as it was simply a series of speed bumps on Iran’s road to nuclear weapons and was also completely silent on Iran’s ballistic missile program and its export of terrorism and arming of its proxies. Obama caved. Completely.
Friends of Israel in the United States tightly fear the negotiating prowess of the ayatollahs as they have been confounding American presidents since Jimmy Carter. Only Trump in his first term took a hard line with Tehran and kept to it, withdrawing from the JCPOA, instituting the “maximum pressure campaign” that brought Iran to its fiscal knees, and by ordering the January 3, 2020 drone strike that killed Qasem Soleimani, Iran’s most feared warrior and strategist near Baghdad International Airport in Iraq.
Along with the Abraham Accords, the tax cuts Trump successfully pursued, and Operation Warp Speed which successfully developed the COVID vaccines in record-shattering time, the crippling of Iran and the rejection of the JCPOA will always be Trump’s major accomplishments of his first term.
In this second term it is hard to imagine that Trump would forfeit his legacy for a bad deal with Iran. A good deal is theoretically possible. Libya disarmed and allowed the removal and destruction of its WMD in late 2003 in the aftermath of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Iran could choose that route too. The regime is as weakened as it has ever been after Israel’s repeated blows to its air defenses and proxy armies over the past year-and-a-half since 10/7 and Trump is methodically overseeing the destruction of the Houthis as he did ISIS early in his first term.
Trump would surely prefer a serious disarmament agreement with Iran to bombing Iran, either on our own or in concert with Israel and perhaps the United Kingdom. The latter means an escalation of conflict with unknown effects throughout the region and the world.
Bombing is, however, the “means of last resort” and time is running out as Iran is believed to be weeks away from “break out” to nuclear weapons and that’s only what we suspect. There well could be sites and programs of which the West is wholly unaware, though Israel seems to have thoroughly penetrated the Islamic Republican Guard Corps. (To such an extent, in fact, that Mossad was able to blow up Hamas senior leader Ismail Haniyeh on July 32, 2024 in the IRGC’s guest house for VIPs in Tehran.)
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If there is no rapid, verifiable deal soon, expect the bombs to fall. It may be that a dozen sites are targeted. It might take two weeks. It wouldn’t be a “war” unless Iran escalated against much stronger foes, an escalation that would risk the regime’s very existence. Trump always punches back, harder. Always.
So to the people who worry about the “even days” when Trump talks up a deal: Remember the Iranians have been trying to assassinate Trump and other senior American officials from Trump’s first term since the hit on Soleimani five years ago. The president knows exactly who he is dealing with: fanatics. But he also knows that even fanatics have existential worries and concerns. A real deal is possible.
Keep your eye on Senator Tom Cotton. He’s a strong supporter of Trump and a hawk’s hawk on Iran as well as chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. Cotton would assess any deal with very critical eyes and would not hesitate to assess it as a disaster or close to one, or to praise it if it deserves praise.
If Trump gets hornswoggled by the mullahs that will define his second term and his lasting legacy. There’s no coming back from a second JCPOA even as Obama can’t escape having signed the first one. So let not your hearts be troubled —yet. The “Art of the Deal” is at play here. Trump knows that a bad deal with Iran makes that phrase a punch line instead of a brand. It is difficult to imagine he’d want “taken to the cleaners like every other president” as the lead paragraph in the biographies that are guaranteed to roll off the presses for years and decades to come.
Hugh Hewitt is a Fox News contributor, and host of “The Hugh Hewitt Show,” heard weekday mornings 6am to 9am ET on the Salem Radio Network, and simulcast on Salem News Channel. Hugh wakes up America on over 400 affiliates nationwide, and on all the streaming platforms where SNC can be seen. He is a frequent guest on the Fox News Channel’s news roundtable hosted by Bret Baier weekdays at 6pm ET. A son of Ohio and a graduate of Harvard College and the University of Michigan Law School, Hewitt has been a Professor of Law at Chapman University’s Fowler School of Law since 1996 where he teaches Constitutional Law. Hewitt launched his eponymous radio show from Los Angeles in 1990. Hewitt has frequently appeared on every major national news television network, hosted television shows for PBS and MSNBC, written for every major American paper, has authored a dozen books and moderated a score of Republican candidate debates, most recently the November 2023 Republican presidential debate in Miami and four Republican presidential debates in the 2015-16 cycle. Hewitt focuses his radio show and his column on the Constitution, national security, American politics and the Cleveland Browns and Guardians. Hewitt has interviewed tens of thousands of guests from Democrats Hillary Clinton and John Kerry to Republican Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump over his 40 years in broadcast, and this column previews the lead story that will drive his radio/ TV show today.