What if the Trump administration had sent more serious negotiators? What if instead of Trump’s real estate buddy and his son-in-law, he had sent — under Marco Rubio, the State Department does have a lot of expertise. Would the Iranians have been open to that? Well, I do believe that the Iranians were actually desperate for a deal. And I base that, again based on the experiences I’ve had with this process. It’s been very rare, and you can ask any European or other negotiator who’s been involved in this process, for the Iranians to come up with their own initiatives. They often prefer to react to other people’s ideas. And yet, in these negotiations, they were coming up with one working paper after another, putting ideas on the table in the hope that it would work. I do believe that they were willing to give President Trump way more than they gave President Obama. Maybe not last year, but certainly this year. And he could have gotten a better nuclear deal if he wanted to. But again, it was not about marginal improvements. It was about Iran surrendering to America’s terms. And from the Iranian regime’s perspective, the only thing that was more perilous than suffering from a U.S. strike would have been surrendering to U.S. terms. Because again, all of this history of the raison d’être of this regime, of safeguarding Iran’s independence, of not being subjugated, especially by an American president, all of that would be undermined. And for a regime that in the process in all these years has also lost, starting from that very high point of popularity at the beginning of the revolution to a point that it now relies on maybe 5 percent to 10 percent of the Iranian society who constitute its core constituents. It cannot afford to alienate them, because then it has nothing to stand on. And that’s why it could not ever afford to capitulate to the United States. But if Trump wanted a better deal than what Obama got, that was certainly on the books.
