Here’s the good news. President Donald Trump is already growing impatient with the progress of the Iran nuclear negotiations that his chief envoy, Steve Witkoff, started only on Saturday. When asked Monday by reporters, he confirmed that the next round of talks are scheduled for next Saturday in Rome. “That’s a long time,” he said. “So I think they might be tapping us along.”
And here’s the bad news. Right after Trump expressed his frustration that the mullahs may be stringing out the talks, he said: “Iran has to get rid of the concept of a nuclear weapon. They cannot have a nuclear weapon.”
This may sound counterintuitive upon first read. Isn’t the whole point of Witkoff’s diplomacy to guarantee Iran will not build a nuclear weapon?
But a weapon is only the final phase of Iran’s vast nuclear-industrial complex. Specifically, weaponization refers to the construction of a deliverable warhead. In this respect, the fact that Trump did not say that Iran cannot have a nuclear program, which is what he insisted on when he scuttled Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran, is a red flag.