A deal is ‘preferable,’ as Trump said, but only if it permanently blocks Iranian nukes

This Editor’s Note was sent out earlier Wednesday in ToI’s weekly update email to members of the Times of Israel Community. To receive these Editor’s Notes as they’re released, join the ToI Community here.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wasn’t merely ambushed by President Donald Trump over the decision to open negotiations with Iran on thwarting its nuclear weapons program. He was presented with a fait accompli, and then immediately required to sit dutifully alongside the president and signal his endorsement.

It was manifestly a surprise to the prime minister, but should not have been: A president who came into office declaring that it was his intention to stop wars, not to start them, is moving ahead, on Saturday, with the talks he had repeatedly said he wanted to hold with the Islamic Republic.

By inviting Netanyahu to the White House on Monday, Trump probably considers that he was actually extending a kind of courtesy to his “very special” friend — informing him about the diplomatic initiative before telling the rest of the world, albeit only a few hours before. This was, of course, the very least he could do, given the fateful consequences for Israel, and given that his diplomacy closes the door for now on Israeli military action.

Had this been a different president, Netanyahu would have fumed over the absent pre-talks coordination with an Israel that is Iran’s first would-be nuclear target. He would have warned of the dangers of naive administration officials negotiating a lousy deal that will not in fact thwart the ayatollahs. He would have declared that he and Israel will not be bound by an inadequate agreement. And down the road, he would have geared up to try to persuade Congress to stop the initiative. These are all steps he took in his failed effort to derail president Barack Obama’s 2015 US-led P5+1 JCPOA deal with Tehran.

Had he been in opposition, needless to say, Netanyahu would have denounced the prime minister of the day for failing to protect Israel’s most vital interests, and branded that PM a danger to Israel’s very survival.

With a different US leader, furthermore, Netanyahu would also certainly have fumed over the president’s public plaudits for Turkey’s Hamas-backing, Israel-hating Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and over the disinclination to give Israel a break on the new tariff regime and the gratuitous snipe at Israel getting $4 billion a year in US aid. (“Congratulations, by the way,” said Trump. “That’s pretty good.”)

But this is Donald Trump — Netanyahu’s great hope, his deep state-smashing ally, and a man who Netanyahu has learned to his cost (after daring to perfunctorily congratulate president Joe Biden for winning the 2020 election) must not be crossed.

And therefore, having sped from Budapest to Washington in the naive, stated belief that he was being summoned as the privileged first global statesman to negotiate terms in the president’s new tariff-driven global economic order, Netanyahu is making the best of it.

הרגע בו הנשיא טראמפ בישר על המו"מ הישיר לדבריו עם איראן. pic.twitter.com/E2hxiNrf9V

— נדב איל Nadav Eyal (@Nadav_Eyal) April 8, 2025

Shell-shocked and squirming in the now-familiar Oval Office world leader torture chair, he attempted, in his opening remarks to the press, to at least partially defuse the (diplomatic) bombshell he had just learned Trump was about to drop. “Of course, we also discussed Iran,” Netanyahu said. “Look, we’re both united in the goal that Iran does not ever get nuclear weapons. If it can be done diplomatically, in a full way, the way it was done in Libya, I think that would be a good thing. But whatever happens, we have to make sure that Iran does not have nuclear weapons.”

He then added, “That’s the end of my speech,” and raised both palms to the cameras in a “that’s all I’ve got” gesture that reinforced his sense of helplessness.

Then came Trump’s big reveal. “Wait, wait, wait,” said the president, silencing the clamor from reporters trying to get in first to ask their pre-planned questions. “We’re having direct talks with Iran. And they’ve started, it’ll go on Saturday. We have a very big meeting and we’ll see what can happen.”

Jaws dropped around the world, but especially in Israel. In the space of a few short, staccato presidential sentences, we were back in 2013, at the start of a diplomatic journey that, last time, yielded an agreement that was finalized two years later, that Netanyahu continually railed against, and that he helped persuade Trump to abandon in 2018.

Except now Iran is all those years closer to a nuclear weapons arsenal — producing enough enriched uranium for a bomb a month, openly enriching to levels that have no peaceful application, its program not even inadequately supervised by the UN’s inspectors, the advance of its ballistic missile capabilities never slowed, its weaponization capabilities uncertain.

And it’s not known how much preparatory work the new administration has done ahead of its imminent interactions with the ultra-skilled, cynical and would-be genocidal Iranians. It’s not even known who will be staffing a US team led by Steve Witkoff, a well-intentioned deal-maker, for sure, but, as The New York Times dryly observed, an official with “no known background in the complex technology of nuclear fuel enrichment, or the many steps to nuclear bomb-making.”

I wrote two months ago about it not being clear that Hamas is receptive to Trump’s dark threats of all hell breaking loose if it doesn’t do what the president tells it that it must. Well, the same applies to the ayatollahs. And all our lives in this country are potentially at stake.

It will be “a very bad day for Iran” if the talks fail, the president warned ominously alongside the uncharacteristically untalkative Netanyahu on Monday. “It would be in Iran’s best interest if they are successful,” said Trump.

“Ooh, I’m shaking,” the bullies would have said if you tried that with them in my high school playground, before thumping you.

“If you’re going to negotiate a new deal with Iran,” one of the reporters reasonably asked Trump, “can you elaborate how it’s going to be more effective than the JCPOA?”

The presidential response was somewhat underwhelming: “Well, I can’t really say that, but I think it will be different and maybe a lot stronger.”

The catastrophe last time

Almost a decade ago, on July 15, 2015, I wrote a column in these pages savaging the newly finalized JCPOA, under the headline: “16 reasons nuke deal is an Iranian victory and a Western catastrophe.”

Given the concern that the Trump administration is rushing into these talks — the two sides don’t even seem to have the same understanding of whether the negotiations, three days away, will be direct (as Trump specified several times on Monday) or indirect (as Iran has repeated several times since) — I want to highlight some of the key, devastating failures that I cited the last time around, in the hope that, just maybe, they and others can be avoided.

“Everybody agrees that doing a deal would be preferable to doing the obvious,” Trump said on Monday, with “the obvious” being military intervention. He’s right — but only, that is, if a new deal, unlike the one from which he withdrew, permanently blocks Iran’s path to nuclear weapons.

Overall and worst of all, the JCPOA actually legitimized Iran’s nuclear program,  because, as I wrote, the deal “allows it to retain core nuclear facilities, permits it to continue research in areas that will dramatically speed its breakout to the bomb should it choose to flout the deal, but also enables it to wait out those restrictions and proceed to become a nuclear threshold state with full international legitimacy.”

Among the colossal flaws I stressed were: Iran was not required to disclose the previous military dimensions of its nuclear program; it was not required to halt all uranium enrichment; it was not required to dismantle its various nuclear facilities; it was not required to halt its ongoing missile development; it was not required to halt R&D on faster centrifuges to accelerate uranium enrichment; it was not required to submit to “anywhere, anytime” inspections of any and all facilities suspected of engaging in rogue nuclear-related activity, and procedures were not established setting out how the international community would respond to different classes of Iranian violations to ensure that an Iranian breakout to the bomb would be prevented.

There was more, in an article that, I later learned, was read into the Congressional Record by Republican Congressman Joe Wilson — to serve, in part, as a warning for successor American political leaderships.

A greater challenge now

The ship has sailed — or rather the high-speed centrifuges have spun — on some of those gaping deficiencies in the 2015 deal. Iran is a decade further along the road not to a bomb, but to a deliverable nuclear arsenal — an Israel-threatening, world-threatening deliverable nuclear arsenal, in the hands of an ideologically and territorially rapacious regime for which Israel is only the Little Satan and the US the Great Satan.

Seeing no choice but to put the best spin on the new reality, Netanyahu asserted in a video statement before heading for home on Tuesday that he and Trump agreed “that Iran will not have nuclear weapons. This can be done by agreement, but only if the agreement is a Libya-style agreement,” he said, whereby those responsible “go in, blow up the facilities, dismantle all the equipment, under American supervision with American execution. That is good.”

“A second possibility is that this does not happen” and Iran “simply drags out talks. And then the option is military. Everyone understands this,” the prime minister said, adding that he and Trump discussed that eventuality at length.

However, even the Libya model, which Iran can be relied upon to refuse, would be inadequate unless accompanied by open-ended, all-access, reliable inspection, and relentless economic pressure for so long as the ayatollahs retain power, since Iran now has all the know-how and resources to start over.

A Channel 12 news report on Tuesday indicated that Israel’s “red line” demands as the talks begin include that any agreement be “long term,” with severe economic sanctions for any violation, and that it ensure the dismantling of Iran’s military nuclear program, the prevention of development and manufacture of ballistic missiles, and the prevention of funding and arming Iranian proxies in the Middle East.

The same TV station also reported, however, that Trump on Monday gave Netanyahu no assurances that his demands would be met, and no commitments on how the US would respond if the talks break down or if Iran violates any deal.

“If diplomacy fails,” Trump was asked on Monday, “is the United States under your leadership ready to take military action to destroy the Iranian nuclear program and remove this threat?”

The president made no such promise — another blow to Netanyahu, who has for years argued that diplomacy with Iran is doomed unless or until the US musters a credible military threat against the regime.

“If the talks aren’t successful with Iran,” Trump merely replied, “I think Iran is going to be in great danger. And I hate to say it. Great danger, because they can’t have a nuclear weapon. It’s not a complicated formula. Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon. That’s all it is. Can’t have it.”

Ooh, I’m shaking, said Ayatollah Khamenei (presumably).

I also noted, back in 2015, that Iran was not required under the JCPOA to stop inciting hatred among its people against Israel and the United States, and to stop its relentless calls for the annihilation of Israel. Of course, it wasn’t. That kind of non-nuclear issue was not discussed at the negotiations.

President Trump, perhaps it should be this time?