Negotiating with Iran is like Wrestling with a Squid

Donald Trump and JD Vance are learning what it’s really like to negotiate with the Iranian regime: it’s like wrestling with a squid. In the morning, you think you have gotten them to agree on one thing, and by afternoon they are denying it on state television.

Just take the Strait of Hormuz. The whole purpose of the June 18 Memorandum of Understanding was to get the Iranians to reopen the Strait to commercial traffic. And yet, on Thursday, an Iranian drone reportedly hit a Singaporean cargo ship transiting the Strait, and earlier today, the Iranian Revolutionary Guards claimed they had forced three foreign tankers to turn around as they attempted to leave the Persian Gulf through an “unauthorized” southern route through the Strait.

So is the Strait open, or are the Iranians still blocking traffic? Meh, it seems to be a bit of both.

As Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on Thursday, don’t pay attention to Iranian propaganda, pay attention to ships moving. And those ships are indeed moving, and so is the oil.

The President and Secretary of War “Pistol Pete” Hegseth have asked Congress for $672 million to fund IAEA and US nuclear inspectors in Iran. Now what are those inspectors supposed to do? Get what Trump calls the “nuclear dust” and take it out of Iran.

For those of you who think the Iran MoU is a sell-out by Trump, take a look at that appropriation request. It is not intended to support ordinary operations of the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna, but is aimed specifically at securing Iran’s uranium stockpiles.

This is the clearest indicator we have of the President’s intent. Yes, Virginia, he really means it when he says he will not allow Iran to ever develop a nuclear weapon. That means, they cannot have enriched uranium or the centrifuges or the infrastructure to produce it, as the JCPOA allowed. They have to abandon the entire program.

One can legitimately question whether the administration will achieve that goal. I happen to think the Iranians will never abandon their nuclear program, their uranium stockpiles, or their centrifuges. After all, they have spent upwards of a trillion dollars to develop those assets, and have forgone hundreds of billions of dollars in oil revenues to keep them. Why would they give up now, especially when their end goal — removal of sanctions, and a pledge by the U.S. to stay out of domestic Iranian politics — seems so close?

I have argued for over thirty years that the nuclear program is one of the regime’s core values. Others include exporting the Islamic Revolution (this is in the Charter of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps), and of course, their system of absolute clerical rule.

And pace to JD Vance, I have long argued that Washington graveyards are full of American politicians who believed they could change the behavior of the Iranian regime by offering them enough goodies. You can find some of my scholarly articles on the subject here.

So I am doubling down on my support for this MoU. It calms the oil markets, and buys Trump and the Republicans time to get closer to the mid-terms, without any significant US concessions. On that subject, I am convinced Trump is 100% serious when he says that any released Iranian assets will go into a US and/or Qatari controlled fund to buy U.S. agricultural products, something the Iranians of course are denying.

But knowing my Iranians, I doubt they will let the negotiations drag on much beyond the 60-day clock, because they think Trump will be forced to capitulate as the mid-terms approach. That is when things will get interesting.

Also this week, the Ukraine war became increasingly deadly for Putin, as the Ukes struck a military satellite communications center deep inside Russian territory and blew up oil terminals on both sides of the Kerch Bridge, Russia’s main route into Crimea.

I have predicting for some time now that this war will end badly for Putin, as the dwindling Russian population is simply not capable of absorbing the staggering human losses of the war, now estimated at more than 1.4 million dead and wounded (with Russian dead estimated at between 230,000-430,000).

This week marks the third anniversary of the failed uprising by Yevgeny Prigozhin, Putin’s former personal chef and the head of the Wagner Group, Putin’s private mercenary army. Rumblings continue inside the army of uprisings to come should Putin fail to end the war. Just in the past two weeks, two more military commanders and former Putin cronies died by falling from windows in their own apartments. (They are Colonel Oleg Sokolenko, a military commissar in Rostov;  and Lt. General sergei Kobylash, the Air Force Commander.)

Really, somebody must do something about those Moscow building codes!

The biggest revelation of the week came, once again, from Donald Trump, who told reporters in the Oval Office on Wednesday that he had kept Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan from entering the Iran war — on the side of Iran!

“He was a prime candidate to go into the war with Iran — maybe on the Iran side, because he’s not a big fan of Israel,” Trump said. “I asked him to stay out. He stayed out.”

A NATO ally, which hosts US forces at Incirlik and still wants to buy F-35 fighter jets, threatening to join a war against the United States?

That’s what I call a show-stopper.

I discuss all this on this week’s Prophecy Today Weekend. As always, you can listen live at 1 PM on Saturday in the Jacksonville, Florida, area on 104.9 FM or 550 AM or by using the Jacksonville Way Radio app.

Yours in freedom.

©2026 Kenneth R. Timmerman. All rights reserved.

Website: kentimmerman.com

Ken Timmerman’s 14th book of non-fiction, THE IRAN HOUSE: Tales of Revolution, Persecution, War, and Intrigue, can be ordered by clicking here or by viewing my author’s page, here. 

Raising Olives in Provence, can be ordered by clicking here.