Israel Lobby Scrambles As Tucker's Influence Grows
Saturday, June 20, 2026 4:24 PM
Friends + Interlocutors,
The MoU reminds me of a Letter of Intent in a real estate transaction. Nobody is actually obligated to anything. It’s a tentative roadmap which could be jettisoned by either side. It does assume that both sides have good intentions and are not playing games. Can we really make that assumption based on Trump's track record with Iran?
Instead, at this point, the focus should remain on the root cause of the war, namely Israel. Hence, I pass along the video above. As with Iraq, Iran would never have been targeted by Washington if it were not for the hammer-lock which Israel and its lobby possesses on U.S. foreign policy and on both political parties.
In this regard, it is depressing to contemplate the gross irresponsibility of Donald Trump in bringing about the present train wreck. Under the spell of Netanyahu and under pressure from his Jewish mega donors, Trump in his first term decided to tear up the Iran nuclear agreement—the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action—which had been carefully negotiated during the Obama administration by Secretary of State John Kerry.
In my view, there was no actual nuclear weapon problem to begin with—it was a red herring manufactured by Israel—but just in case there was a problem, the JCPOA solved it. End of story. David Stockman focused on this yesterday…
Iran was already committed to “no nukes” as a signatory of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty; had re-committed to that status in the 2015 JCPOA; and has maintained an internal policy of not seeking nuclear weapons since at least 2003. The latter, in fact, was confirmed in the 2007 NIE and reinforced by the 2015 IAEA findings in conjunction with the implementation of the JCPOA and subsequent US intelligence agency findings.
So what the MOU does, at the end of the day, is essentially establish at 60 day cease fire window in which an attempt is to be made to put the Humpty-Dumpty of the JCPOA back together again….
Here it is well to consider what the JCPOA actually did and why the Donald’s reckless shit-canning of the deal in May 2018 probably was one of the greatest mistakes of American foreign policy in the entire history of the nation.
So to begin, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), finalized on July 14, 2015, represented one of the most technically detailed and intrusive non-proliferation agreements in history. Negotiated between Iran and the P5+1 (United States, United Kingdom, France, Russia, China, and Germany, plus the European Union), it aimed to sharply extend the theoretical breakout time to a nuclear weapon—well beyond the physics and manufacturing hurdles that existed in their own right.
The deal achieved this through layered restrictions on enrichment capacity, elimination of the plutonium pathway entirely, and an unprecedented verification regime.
Needless to say, the negotiations were protracted. Secret U.S.-Iran talks began in 2013 in Oman, followed by the interim Joint Plan of Action in November 2013. Intensive multilateral negotiations produced a framework in April 2015 and the final 159-page agreement (including five detailed annexes and appendices) on July 14, 2015.
Thus, from the ramp-up of serious talks to finalization, the process spanned roughly 18 to 22 months of complex bargaining over technical, legal, and political details. The document itself is exceptionally long for an international accord—often described as the longest multilateral agreement since World War II—because its annexes contain highly specific implementation schedules, technical specifications, monitoring protocols, and dispute-resolution mechanisms….
In short, Trump’s war on Iran has been a horrible waste of time, money, and lives. A colossal scandal. There was no reason for it. There is no way to predict how the tragedy will end.
In short, the JCPOA’s intricate provisions—centrifuge caps and modernization bans, enrichment-level and location restrictions, plutonium pathway elimination via Arak redesign, and an exceptionally intrusive IAEA verification system—created multiple overlapping barriers. Even a modern day Houdini could not have escaped its barriers to a nuke, which the Iranians weren’t pursuing in any event.
At the end of the day, the whole case against the JCPOA was a crock—another Big Lie by Netanyahu that the Donald embraced lock, stock and barrel. And now he’s trying to put it back together under circumstances that are not remotely suitable for the purpose….
Patrick
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