[News] Iranian diplomats suspect Trump using talks as instrument of sabotage

[Anti-Imperialist News]

thegrayzone.com
<https://thegrayzone.com/2025/05/21/iranian-diplomats-trump-sabotage/>
Iranian diplomats suspect Trump using talks as instrument of sabotage
Max Blumenthal
May 21, 2025
------------------------------
[image: Screenshot-2025-05-21-at-3.02.19 PM.png]
In Tehran, bewildered diplomats told me they suspect the Trump
administration is exploiting nuclear negotiations as a instrument for
generating instability to weaken Iran’s economy and foment social strife

With nuclear negotiations between the Trump administration and Iran’s
Reformist government at a standstill, I held two separate, lengthy
background conversations in Tehran this past week with a pair of seasoned
Iranian diplomats with detailed knowledge of the talks in Muscat, Oman.

Like most Iranians, the diplomats were eager for a durable deal that would
provide sanctions relief. But they said their side could not seem to break
through to a Trump team they described as dithering, divided, distracted by
other conflicts, and incapable of holding to a consistent position. Worse,
as the negotiations drag on, the Trump administration is defaulting toward
the hardline Israeli position which rejects all uranium enrichment, even
for civilian purposes, violating a right Tehran considers sacrosanct.

The Iranian diplomats have now begun to suspect the Trump administration
held an ulterior motive for engaging in talks, and is exploiting the
meetings in Oman as a instrument for generating instability to weaken
Iran’s economy and foment social strife.

Their comments to me echoed a warning issued by the Leader of Iran’s
Islamic Republic, Ayatollah Khamenei, as Tehran considered a request from
Trump for nuclear talks last March. “Negotiating with this US
administration won’t result in the sanctions being removed,” Khamenei
declared <https://x.com/khamenei_ir/status/1899865973806502309>. “It will
cause the knot of sanctions to become tighter and pressure to increase.”

Following two months of political confusion and a significant escalation of
US financial warfare, the Ayatollah’s words have proven prescient. Iran’s
Reformist government now risks repeating the folly of the 2015 Joint
Comprehensive Plan Of Action, or JCPOA, which failed to deliver meaningful
sanctions relief in the brief period before Trump shredded the deal, and
ultimately led to a regime of “maximum pressure” culminating with the US
assassination of Iranian Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani.

Iran’s government entered the latest round of talks under heavy pressure,
with Trump dispatching a B-2 bomber strike force to the Diego Garcia
Airbase to enforce his demands.  The negotiations also took place in the
shadow of the post-October 7 wars, in which Iran’s regional allies had
suffered serious setbacks and with the last retaliation it vowed against
Israel, True Promise III, still unfulfilled. Iranian public opinion
researcher Ebrahim Moehseni told me his polling at the time showed that a
majority of Iranians from all social sectors supported the talks.

According to the two diplomats I spoke to in Tehran, Iran’s negotiating
team arrived in Oman with a sense of pessimism, but quickly grew more
positive as they realized the Americans were not introducing demands for
Iran to sever relations with its allies in Lebanon and Yemen, scrap its
long range ballistic missiles, or destroy its reactors in Natanz and
Fordow. But after each encouraging exchange, they watched key Trump
negotiators issue bellicose statements to media immediately after returning
to Washington, essentially reversing the positions they had taken in
Muscat. The Iranians suspected Trump’s team, led by real estate lawyer
Steve Witkoff, was kowtowing to Israeli assets like the Foundation for the
Defense of Democracies and its top donor, Miriam Adelson.

During each round of talks, the Iranian team introduced concrete proposals
to bridge disagreements and maintain momentum. But according to the
diplomats I spoke to, they found themselves waiting for a week or more to
receive a reply from the Americans. They described Witkoff as distracted by
other diplomatic assignments and said he often put Iran on the back burner
while he tended to Ukraine-Russia negotiations or the Gaza war.

The diplomats were especially concerned by the apparent power struggle
<https://www.yahoo.com/news/rubio-slams-cnn-report-frustrated-190920339.html>
between Witkoff and Secretary of State Marco Rubio. They suspected that
Rubio was exploiting US media appearances to project control over the
negotiations, and worried that his apparent rivalry with Witkoff would
prevent Trump’s team from reaching a consensus on the nuclear issue.

One Iranian diplomat referenced historian Robert Dallek’s book, The
American Style of Foreign Policy, to elucidate his view that the Trump
administration’s counter-productive approach reflected a deeper crisis in
the US establishment. The 1983 book argued that domestic pressures and
social shifts at home have placed US foreign policy makers on a
persistently irrational trajectory. The diplomat pointed to former
Secretary of State Tony Blinken as a case study in Dallek’s thesis,
recalling how Blinken routinely moved the goalposts on previous agreements
with Iran in order to prevent negotiations from taking concrete form during
the Biden years. His implication, as I read it, was the preponderance of
pressure from the Israel lobby and military industry had been too
overwhelming to allow either the Biden or Trump administration to execute a
lasting deal.

Both diplomats I spoke to brought up recent reports
<https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/witkoff-hamas-trump-deal-edan-alexander-lift-blockade-israel>
revealing that Witkoff had promised Hamas he would force Israel to lift the
starvation siege on the Gaza Strip if they released the US-Israeli captive
Edan Alexander. They were dismayed that Witkoff had reneged on his promise
and allowed Israel to slaughter hundreds of civilians in an apocalyptic
frenzy throughout the week. Trump’s bad faith tactics with Hamas have cast
a pall over the negotiations in Oman, fueling Iranian pessimism about a
workable deal.

But perhaps no statement was more damaging to the prospect of a deal than
Witkoff’s proclamation
<https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/trump-envoy-witkoff-cites-us-red-line-with-iran-against-uranium-enrichment-2025-05-18/>
on ABC’s ‘This Week’: “We have one very, very clear red line, and that is
enrichment. We cannot allow even 1% of an enrichment capability.”

The comments fit the pattern of Trump negotiators sabotaging progress in
Oman by issuing onerous demands and threats immediately after returning to
Washington. And few issues are more central to the Islamic Republic’s sense
of independence than its civilian nuclear program.
A tour of Tehran’s nuclear reactor illustrates the ‘battle of wills’

While in Tehran, Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI) invited
me and a small group of journalists and academics to tour the city’s
Nuclear Research Center, an active reactor originally constructed with US
assistance under the Shah.

Once inside the vast facility (without our phones, as recording devices
were strictly forbidden), we were treated to an exhibition touting the many
lifesaving products of Iran’s nuclear program, from advancements in
radiotherapy to the production of anti-cancer drugs to the sterilization of
medical devices and protection of agriculture.

The visit was clearly designed to illustrate the importance of nuclear
energy to Iran’s national development, and the absolute commitment of its
leadership to continuing the project despite the continuous threat of
assassination, sabotage and all-out war.
Touring the Tehran Nuclear Research Center this May 2025

Following our tour, we met with Beyrouz Kamalvandi, a veteran Iranian
diplomat now serving as spokesman for the AEOI. Like the other Iranian
diplomats I spoke to, Kamalvandi volunteered his country’s desire to abide
by all its obligations under the Non-Proliferation Treaty. But he viewed
Iran’s civilian nuclear program as the key to consolidating its
technological edge, and an absolute right under international law.

“They want to do with us what they did with Gaza, where the entire society
is besieged,” Kamalvandi proclaimed. “But we have a great civilization, and
it’s only a matter of time before they realize we won’t submit. This is not
just a battle over enrichment, it’s a battle of wills.”
Atomic Energy Organization of Iran spokesman Behrouz Kamalvandi during our
tour of the Tehran Nuclear Research Center

At one point during the meeting, Kamalvandi pointed to a young man seated
in the back row of the conference room, asked him to stand, and identified
him as the son of the Iranian quantum field theorist Massoud Ali-Mohammadi,
who was assassinated by a Mossad asset in 2010. Ten years later, Iran lost
the godfather of its nuclear program, Mohsen Fakrizadeh, when the Mossad
smuggled a machine gun drone into the country and stationed it along a road
to attack Fakrizadeh’s convoy. Kamalvandi, for his part, was injured and
hospitalized
<https://www.timesofisrael.com/iran-says-natanz-was-hit-by-small-explosion-claims-damage-quickly-repairable/>
in 2021 while inspecting a part of the Natanz reactor that had been damaged
by an Israeli attack.

In the eyes of Iran’s leadership, Witkoff’s demand to end enrichment was
not only a recipe for squandering decades of technological advancement, it
was an insult to the top tier scientists cut down by Israeli assassins. If
this is the new baseline for a deal, negotiations are an exercise in
futility. And yet the show goes on.
Economic sabotage behind the guise of negotiations

Since negotiations began, the value of the Iranian rial has fluctuated
wildly against the dollar, improving in value after the first round of
positive exchanges, then depreciating following each wave of bellicose
threats from Trump and his team. I personally witnessed Iran’s financial
chaos each time I attempted to exchange dollars for rials, as business
owners consulted their phones for the new rate, which seemed to shift from
day to day depending on the US president’s rhetoric. A friend joked that I
would have paid a substantially lower rate to book a hotel room for my
family if negotiations were not currently taking place.

Trump’s statements about the negotiations have also roiled oil markets. On
May 16, when Trump claimed he was “getting close to maybe a deal” with
Iran, the price of oil plummeted
<https://www.barrons.com/livecoverage/stock-market-today-050515/card/oil-prices-fall-on-weaker-demand-possible-u-s-iran-deal-bwt3y8AaT1mVdBqO62uA>
by 3.4%. Then came Witkoff’s call to cease enrichment, and on May 20, US
intelligence leaked a warning that Israel was planning to attack Iran’s oil
facilities, causing a sudden surge
<https://oilprice.com/Energy/Oil-Prices/Oil-Jumps-on-Possibility-of-Israeli-Attack-on-Iran.html>
in oil prices.

The American president’s ability to manipulate financial markets both
inside and outside Iran with his bluster has contributed to a sense that
entering the negotiations have weakened Iran’s political position.
Meanwhile, Trump’s crude insults to Iran’s sense of national honor and
sovereignty have disrupted whatever goodwill existed when talks began.

The president’s announcement
<https://apnews.com/article/trump-persian-gulf-saudi-arabia-ce30874c27bc01426d93ad3c65a18844>
on May 7 that he was considering renaming the Persian Gulf to “the Arabian
Gulf” fueled outrage across Iran — uniting everyone from pro-government
principlists, to reformists, to pro-regime change monarchists in opposition
to the insult to their national pride. Tehran responded with a billboard
campaign condemning the change and a lawsuit
<https://nournews.ir/en/news/224042/Iran-to-take-legal-action-against-Google-over-distortion-of-the-Persian-Gulf%E2%80%99s-name>
against Google for abiding by the name change on its Maps applications.

Trump’s speech in Riyadh
<https://www.timesofisrael.com/full-text-of-trumps-speech-in-riyadh-dawn-of-the-bright-new-day-for-the-great-people-of-the-middle-east/?__cf_chl_rt_tk=j8dQKOUuHDcZ.3eEUHGWe1dCt7aJsqw7Xk3QiVs_E_o-1747861712-1.0.1.1-PMTEClYnHmJzionQocqlutcrEYTHmcZZcCmzYq5ZBIo>
deepened the enmity, as he attempted to pit the Iranian public against its
leadership, praising his unelected, monarchic hosts for supposedly having
“turned dry deserts into fertile farmland,” while accusing Iran’s leaders
of “turn[ing] green farmland into dry deserts, as their corrupt water
mafia…causes droughts and empty riverbeds. They get rich, but they don’t
let the people have any of it.”

Two days after Trump’s address in Riyadh, dust storms from the growing
deserts of Saudi Arabia gusted into Iran
<https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/dust-storm-blankets-tehran-after-hitting-iraq/ar-AA1EQAF0>,
clouding the skies over Tehran and keeping many residents indoors. The
irony did not escape those who heard Trump’s praise for the House of Saud’s
supposed green miracle. Meanwhile, there is a growing sense that war clouds
are gathering as well.

One well-connected Iranian academic in Tehran told me he expected his
country to be on the receiving end of Israeli sabotage and confrontation
throughout the summer. Both diplomats I spoke to insisted that in such a
scenario, True Promise III was an option on the table.
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