No one should be surprised at Iran’s coolness toward a meeting with President Trump. He has offered to sit down with their leadership and hash out a new nuclear agreement after tearing up the one President Obama concocted.
Can anyone blame the Iranians? They got a sweet deal from Obama desperately seeking some sort of “legacy” in the Middle East. The old expression goes, “He bought the farm.”
That phrase is appropriate. The United States agreed to hand over billions in Iranian frozen assets, lift the sanctions that were beginning to tighten the noose and generally gave the Iranians free reign in the region to generously fund terrorism. Obama’s agreement was a stupid deal from the start.
Along comes a president that neutralizes the ridiculous deal and the Iranians sit on their hands and whine like children. In other words, don’t look for any improvement in U.S.-Iranian relations anytime soon.
There will be no summit between President Trump and Iranian President Hassan Rouhani now or in the immediate future. To make that point, the powerful head of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, Gen. Mohammad Jafari, has sharply rejected President Trump’s tongue-in-cheek offer to meet with Iran’s leaders.
There is little chance Trump is remotely surprised. He’s getting used to cleaning up messes other administrations have left him; That includes more presidents than Obama.
Nevertheless, Trump told the media, “They want to meet, I’ll meet. Anytime they want. Anytime they want.” He added, “It’s good for the country, good for them, good for us, and good for the world. No preconditions. If they want to meet, I’ll meet.”
Trump is famous for shooting from the hip and his Secretary of State Mike Pompeo quickly cleaned up the president’s free-wheeling comments. He added preconditions for any meeting that included the Iranians needing to “reduce their malign behavior” and “enter into a nuclear agreement that actually prevents proliferation.”
The whole idea had the Iranian Republic leaders boiling mad. They think Trump has no respect for them.
Well, he doesn’t, and that is obvious. He understands the Iranians have been cheating heavily since the agreement via Israeli intelligence and other sources. He demands they negotiate faithfully and credibly.
America’s Arab Gulf allies, including the always suspicious Saudis, are supposedly behind America 100 percent. Trump does not trust them and for good reason. There is still a very big likelihood the Saudi government’s fingerprints were all over the 9/11 attacks.
Iran continues to aggressively exploit its expansionist power. They are exploiting sectarian fault lines to remake the Arabian Peninsula-Persian Gulf region and the wider Middle East in its own revolutionary image. If that were to succeed, the implications for America are immense.
Obama’s 2015 Iran nuclear deal that included the U.S. and six other countries is a bust. Iran never had the slightest intention of abiding by the agreement. It was never even ratified by the Senate because Obama knew it wouldn’t be.
It appears that the days of trusting Iran, or any other Middle East government, is yesterday’s news with this president. “Trust but verify” is the order of the day.
