In Trump’s delusions of peace with Iran and efforts to bully Israel, dark echoes of appeasement

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.

Mahmoud Nabavian, an Iranian MP, the deputy head of the national security council and a former negotiator with the US, appeared on Iranian state television on Saturday to denounce the memorandum of understanding his colleagues had signed with US President Donald Trump.

Claiming to have seen correspondence from Mojtaba Khamenei, Nabavian specified that the new supreme leader had set 11 conditions for the negotiations that produced the MOU and led to this week’s further talks in Switzerland, and that Iran’s negotiating teams had proved overly compromising and failed to heed Khamenei’s instructions.

Among the conditions that Nabavian said Khamenei had set, and that the negotiators had failed to insist upon, were maintaining Iran’s “right” to enrich uranium, the lifting of sanctions, the release of Iran’s billions of dollars of frozen assets, Iranian sovereignty over the Strait of Hormuz and the charging of fees for traversing the waterway, and the full withdrawal of Israeli forces from Lebanon.

The interview on Irib (Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting), which was abruptly curtailed, caused a bit of a rumpus in Iran. For one thing, how had Nabavian gotten hold of Khamenei’s secret correspondence? For another, how had he been allowed onto state television to detail its content and denounce Iran’s negotiators and their tactics?

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At least one official at the broadcaster has resigned, the Guardian reported, the program in question has been removed from the Irib archive, and Nabavian may face legal action.

The bitter irony, however, is that the emphatically hardline conditions that Nabavian claims Khamenei was demanding, and that he sallied forth to set out on state TV as ostensible proof of the current negotiators’ failings, have been more than met in the MOU and the opening sessions of the negotiations in Switzerland this week.

Sanctions are being waived and assets unfrozen, saving the regime from financial collapse and enabling it to lavishly fund its military machine. Iran has asserted sovereignty over Hormuz and made plain it intends to charge tolls once the 60 days of talks are over. Israel is under mounting American pressure to fully withdraw from Lebanon, easing Hezbollah’s resurgence. And far from merely securing the right to enrich uranium, the regime has conceded nothing whatsoever as regards its nuclear program; it maintains its stockpile of 60 percent enriched uranium and its vast stocks of uranium enriched to lower levels, with just a vague requirement to discuss nuclear issues during the 60-day period. Even the US claim that Iran has agreed to the resumption of inspections by the UN’s nuclear watchdog is disputed.

The MOU also fails to require the demolition of Iran’s ballistic missile program, an end to Iranian terrorism worldwide, or the cessation of its support for Hamas, Hezbollah and other proxies — other key US-Israeli war goals.

Rather than failing to meet the supreme leader’s reported requirements, as Navabian claimed, Khamenei’s negotiators, led by Mohammad Bagher (“Death to America”) Ghalibaf and Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, knocked the ball out of the park.

They leveraged control of Hormuz to persuade an openly desperate Trump to adopt a devastating deal-making “strategy”: concede to an enemy that you recognize constitutes a potential existential threat to much of humanity and a direct existential threat to what was once your key regional ally, attempt to mask the capitulation with endless verbiage, and try to bully and prevent that ally from effectively defending itself.

Lead US negotiator Vice President JD Vance, while purportedly baffled by “this whole freakout in Israel” over the appeasement strategy as reflected in the MOU, did have a partial point when telling Israel’s leaders, “You can’t just kill your way out of solving every single national security problem that you have.”

And the far-right racist demagogues at the heart of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition continue, as throughout the war since Hamas’s October 7, 2023, invasion, to engender mistrust of Israel’s policies and wariness of its potential expansionist ambitions.

This week, after the killing by Hezbollah of four Israeli soldiers in southern Lebanon, Itamar Ben Gvir declared that “all of Lebanon needs to burn.” Netanyahu saw no need to condemn or distance himself from the demand. Ben Gvir and his fellow Jewish supremacist Bezalel Smotrich have also repeatedly urged permanent Israeli control of the West Bank and Gaza, while extremist settlers are violently and relentlessly seeking to encourage the Palestinian populace to leave.

But there are some “national security problems” that do require the resort to force, including deadly force, and the Islamic extremist Iranian regime’s march to the bomb — combined with its support for terrorist armies attacking across Israel’s northern and southern borders — is precisely such a problem. Military might alone does not always alleviate the danger, in which case military achievement, ongoing deterrence and effective diplomacy can combine to, at the very least, keep it at bay until the threat is definitively overcome.

The Trump administration recognized all this until the February 28 war against Iran — perhaps unrealistically ambitious and certainly inadequately planned — failed to bring down the Islamic Republic. The US president knew, and still acknowledges, that this regime will use the bomb to destroy Israel and a great deal more if it gets there.

But with one eye on oil prices and the US economy, and the other on short-term politics and long-term legacy, he’s no longer staring down the ayatollahs. He just wants the war over, reassures nobody but himself that the regime is now new, nice and not at all radical, and turns up the heat on anyone — including that “fucking crazy” Netanyahu — who dares to raise inconvenient concerns about national survival.

Heart still set on the receding prospect of a Nobel Peace Prize, Trump may also be trashing Netanyahu personally because he knows the Saudis will never sign up to the Abraham Accords so long as the “warrior prime minister” is in office.

While hardline dissenter Nabavian is railing on Iranian state TV about the supposed overly compromising provisions of the MOU, the US president and his deputy are doing their best to ensure Iran’s demands are met, notably by seeking to compel Israel to give up the fight against Hezbollah and withdraw to the international border, relying for its defense on an absurd “deconfliction” mechanism to reportedly include the US, Iran, Lebanon, Qatar, and Pakistan — but not Israel. Along with Hezbollah, Vance graciously allowed on Monday, Israel would be part of the “conversation.”

Next up, presumably, is a “deconfliction” mechanism for Tehran’s nuclear program comprising Iran, Qatar, Pakistan and Turkey, with the US part of the conversation, and Israel updated by pigeon-post.

Last Monday, two days before signing the MOU with Iran, Trump proclaimed that “This Great Deal will bring Peace and Security to the whole Region.” Claims to be making peace with a tyrannical regime determined to destroy a vulnerable ally, excluding that ally from negotiations, undermining that ally’s capacity to defend itself, and telling it to do what it’s told and that you know what’s best for it, all have dire historical echoes.

Not incidentally, Neville Chamberlain was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1939 for his role in the previous year’s Munich Agreement. Adolf Hitler was nominated, too, in an act of “irony” by an anti-fascist Swedish parliamentarian, who then withdrew the nomination. No Nobel Peace Prize was awarded that year, however, being as how appeasement had failed, the Nazis had swallowed Czechoslovakia and then invaded Poland, and World War II had begun.