President Trump was on a conference calllate last month from the Situation Room with leaders from across the Middle East and South Asia to pitch a deal that he believed was within reach to end the conflict in Iran. Trump asked for their support in a roll call, going one by one through Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Turkey, Egypt, Jordan, Bahrain, and Pakistan. All answered in the affirmative. Trump’s tone, according to officials briefed on the conversation, suggested that he believed each country should be in his debt for taking on Iran. And he wanted their individual sign-off so he could claim a joint initiative to rein in the regime.
But then Trump reached for something bigger: He proposed linking the Iran negotiations to a major expansion of the Abraham Accords, the U.S.-brokered agreements normalizing relations between Israel and some of its neighbors that Trump regards as a signature foreign-policy achievement. He suggested that those countries that hadn’t yet joined the Abraham Accords get on board—but received a less than lukewarm response.
A U.S. official, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive diplomatic efforts, told us one leader piped up to say that it was an interesting suggestion; foreign officials described an awkward silence. Several times during the 90-minute call, Trump had to interject: “Hello? Hello? Anyone there?”
The awkwardness of the conversation, the details of which have not been previously reported, encapsulates what has gone awry in the roughly eight weeks since the United States and Iran entered a tentative cease-fire designed to allow negotiations for a longer-term deal. That agreement has remained out of reach, despite repeated indications that it was all but done, through a combination of mutual skepticism, differing incentives, the variety of issues to resolve, and Trump’s determination to force a grand regional transformation.
Critics of Trump’s decision to go to war contend that his impulse to go big masks the weakness of his negotiating position despite the U.S. military’s dominance. Washington and Tel Aviv leveled some 15,000 targets in the first two weeks in Iran and killed dozens of Iran’s top leaders. “Operation Epic Fury—some of you didn’t like it, some of you did—was highly successful in achieving its military objectives, which was dramatically reducing the defense-industrial base of Iran,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee yesterday, offering yet another version of why the U.S. went to war.
But Tehran has succeeded simply by surviving the onslaught and has gained leverage by taking control of the Strait of Hormuz. As a result, Trump has been unable to convert tactical success on the battlefield into any lasting diplomatic or political achievement. None of his original war goals has been met, and the pressure to get a deal done is arguably now greater for Trump than it is for Iran, given the war’s broad unpopularity in the United States and the approaching midterm elections.
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Israel, meanwhile, has been reluctant to abandon its war in Lebanon—as Iran is demanding—because Tel Aviv sees an opportunity to deliver a blow to Hezbollah, Iran’s proxy, much as Israeli forces have done to Hamas in Gaza. Israel’s actions also have made an expansion of the Abraham Accords unlikely. The same day that he talked with the group of leaders, Trump held a follow-up call with Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to push his proposal. MBS, as he is known, emphasized that he was open to the idea of normalization with Israel down the line if the formation of a Palestinian state is on the table, U.S. officials told us.
Every attempt to seal a deal has expanded the list of issues or created new wrinkles that prevent progress. What began as a narrow negotiation to end the conflict has become a grab bag of objectives: constrain Iran’s nuclear program and destroy its highly enriched uranium, reopen shipping through the strait, achieve a durable cease-fire in Lebanon, reassure Persian Gulf monarchies that they can count on U.S. protection, and, if possible, reshape the political map of the Middle East through new alliances with Israel.
The likely result is not another “forever war” of the sort that Trump has repeatedly condemned, but a “forever limbo,” where all sides involved have sufficient incentive to stay at the table but not enough to make binding commitments. Even if a near-term pact is struck that gets some commercial shipping moving again, easing the global energy shortage, the list of unresolved issues kicked into the subsequent 60-day negotiating period appears so complex that the most relevant proposed clause may be the one that allows for the indefinite extension of talks, after their initial two-month period, in 60-day increments.
Source: Drudge Report
