The Stupidest 'Red Line'

Washington wants to dictate terms as if the U.S. were the conqueror, but it hasn’t conquered anything and it shouldn’t try.

The president’s special envoy Steve Witkoff reconfirmed the administration’s extreme position on the nuclear issue. He said this in an interview with Breitbart:

An enrichment program can never exist in the state of Iran ever again. That’s our red line. No enrichment.

Iran can’t accept these terms without humiliation, and they have said countless times that they won’t agree to this. Witkoff claimed in the same interview that “they have no choice” but to accept Washington’s terms. The U.S. side is completely inflexible and unwilling to make the necessary compromise to reach an agreement. If the administration truly wanted talks with Iran to succeed, they would drop their absurd fixation on eliminating Iran’s enrichment capabilities. The fact that they won’t drop it is further proof that they don’t want a diplomatic solution.

One of the many flaws in the administration’s Iran policy is that they genuinely don’t understand the Iranian side and have no interest in trying to understand them. If they tried to see things from Iran’s side, they might begin to grasp why domestic enrichment is so important to the Iranians. Retaining this capability is a matter of national pride and national rights. Telling them that they must abandon it amounts to demanding that they betray their own country. No government interested in its own survival would do that.

The Iranian foreign minister recently said, “Enrichment capability is one of the honors and achievements of the Iranian nation.” Following the meeting on Sunday, he said again that enrichment “must continue and there is no room for compromise on it.” Does this sound like someone who thinks he has no choice except to surrender? When a country is forced to choose between what it considers dishonorable capitulation and confrontation, its leaders may very well decide on the latter.

Iran is within its rights to have its own enrichment capability. It is unrealistic to expect them to trade that away for the sake of sanctions relief that might be revoked at any moment. Several other non-nuclear weapons states have these facilities, and there is no good reason why Iran can’t have them. The U.S. demand is excessive and unnecessary.

The administration thinks that Iran must yield because of how “vulnerable” it is, but this is why their diplomats aren’t going to budge on this question. Iran may be more vulnerable than it has been in a long time, but that makes preserving their nuclear program that much more important to them. Considering how much time and effort they have put into building up their program and considering how much it has cost them, they have very strong incentives to reject Trump’s deranged demand of total dismantlement.

The U.S. acts as if it it is negotiating the terms of a surrender after a major defeat, but Iran doesn’t consider itself to have been defeated. Washington wants to dictate terms as if the U.S. were the conqueror, but it hasn’t conquered anything and it shouldn’t try. The diplomatic solution has been there for the taking all along, just as it was when Biden was president. The administration has to be willing to swallow its pride and accept something more or less like the original nuclear deal, or it will end up with nothing.

Witkoff says that no enrichment is the administration’s “red line.” If the administration really means that, it is the stupidest red line of all. Iran’s nuclear program can remain peaceful without eliminating Iran’s ability to enrich. Trying to force Iran to give up enrichment when it isn’t necessary is a good way to create a crisis and bring our countries closer to armed conflict.