Should Trump negotiate a nuke deal with Iran or bomb it?

Pedestrians pass an anti-U. S. mural depicting Iran-U. S. negotiations, near the former U.S. Embassy in Tehran, April 26. (Abedin Taherkenareh/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock)

Should Trump negotiate a nuke deal with Iran or bomb it?

Washington Post-May 8th2024

Marc A. Thiessen

President Donald Trump has a decision to make: Should he negotiate a nuclear deal with Iran or subject Iran to “bombing the likes of which they’ve never seen”?

The answer is: It depends on the nuclear deal.

Trump says he will accept nothing less than “total dismantlement” of Iran’s nuclear program. He’s right to take that stand. So, what does “total dismantlement” look like? Fortunately, we have an example. In 2003, Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi invited outside officials to come in and dismantle his nuclear, chemical weapons and ballistic missile programs. U.S. military aircraft later landed in Libya, and the Libyan nuclear program — including its uranium hexafluoride, centrifuges and designs to build bombs — was crated up and loaded onto the planes, which were flown to a secure storage facility in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Libya’s enriched uranium was also removed, its chemical munitions destroyed and its ballistic missiles dismantled.

Visiting the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in July 2004, President George W. Bush toured the facility and declared: “Eight months ago, the centrifuge parts and processing equipment for uranium were 5,000 miles away in the nation of Libya. They were part of a secret nuclear weapons program. Today, Libya, America, and the world are better off because these components are safely in your care.

Trump understands that anything short of this in Iran would be unacceptable. As he recently told Fox News’s Bret Baier, he wants a deal where the U.S. goes into Iran to “supervise, check it, inspect it and then blow it up or just make sure that there is no more nuclear” weapons capability.

So why would Iran agree to a deal with Trump like the one Libya reached with Bush? Because the mullahs have no choice. Iran is weaker than it has been at any time since the 1979 revolution. Over the past year and a half, Iran’s network of terrorist proxies has suffered blow after devastating blow: Trump has pummeled the Houthis in Yemen, while Israel has destroyed the leadership of both Hamas and Hezbollah. And thanks to Trump’s restoration of “maximum pressure,” the value of Iran’s currency has fallen to record lows — leaving Tehran with few resources to rebuild this terrorist network.