What is there to negotiate?

Tuesday, February 3, 2026 2:17 PM

Friends + Interlocutors,

According to this article in yesterday’s Financial Times, Iran is headed to the negotiating table with Donald Trump’s golfing sidekick Steve Witkoff who flys to Tel Aviv today to get his final briefing from headquarters. 

Then Witkoff heads to Turkey or somewhere else. I would not be surprised to see Trump's Forrest Gump-like son-in-law, Jared Kushner, parachute into the picture along the way. It’s a circus.

In which case you’d have two ardent American Zionists conspiring with Bibi Netanyahu to corner Iran. The three worked wonders together on the Gaza dossier to bury the Palestinians. 

Trump brags he’s brought the Gaza conflict to an end, having morphed it into a real estate project involving these two New York real estate developers financed by the Gulf Kinglets. Such a deal and such a scandal.

The FT reports that Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian has issued orders to begin negotiations with Washington within a strictly nuclear framework. That is smart and clever. 

Why? Because Iran has no nuclear weapons program but only a nuclear program for civilian purposes which is perfectly legit. There is an existing religious Fatwa forbidding nuclear weapons production, and Iran remains a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). 

Washington and Tel Aviv know all about this of course. They’ve known it for years. Israel does not join the NPT for the simple reason that it has hundreds of nuclear warheads and the means to deliver them...like its fleet of advanced U-boats gifted from Germany. 

If the International Atomic Energy Agency’s inspectors were allowed in to discover Israel's nuclear weapons, then Washington would be obligated by Congressional law to cut off foreign aid to Israel. Can you imagine?

In sum, what is there to negotiate? Nothing. The Iranian nuclear danger is a ruse, a diversion, a cover story, a charade. Trump is using it as an excuse to attack Iran, to sanction Iran, to destabilize Iran, to demonize Iran and promote regime change. This is what Israel demands. 

The actual danger to Israel is that Iran tells the truth about Zionism and the Palestinians. Tel Aviv wants that truth-telling mission shut down for good and Iran destroyed for its impudence. Israel is using Trump to do that.

Another cardinal sin is that Iran can defend itself. We are talking about ballistic and cruise missiles and drones, not non-existent nuclear bombs. Tel Aviv wants to extend its free-fire zone over all of the Middle East so as to fully embrace its self-assigned role as the regional hegemon. 

Iran stands in the way. This manufactured crisis is all about Israel—as was the case with Iraq and Syria—and the entire affair has actually little to do with the U.S., except that the latter is a puppet state of the former.

Patrick
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