Steve Witkoff and Those Iranian Nukes

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My guess is, we will know soon enough whether the firing of National Security Advisor Mike Waltz heralds a shift in Trump policy, or was merely a personnel decision.

Trump hinted it was the latter just days after Waltz’s deputy, Alex Wong, invited a journalist to an encrypted Signal chat.

Speaking to reporters on Air Force One on April 3, the President applauded his national security team for their “big success with the Houthis,” but added this: “Always, we’re going to let go of people we don’t like, or people we don’t think can do the job, or people who may have loyalties to somebody else.”

And the fact that Waltz was not exiled to Outer Slobbovia but sent instead to New York as our United Nations representative, argues that the President continues to respect Waltz and his bold advocacy of America First positions.

That is not the case with Steve Witkoff, one of several people whose names have been floated as Waltz’s successor. Remember that during his first negotiating session with the Iranians Witkoff said it was just fine and dandy for them to retain their uranium enrichment capabilities, just as long as they limited it to 3.67%.

That is like handing them the keys to a dual-motor Tesla and expecting them to keep it below 30 mpH.

Witkoff was summoned back to Washington after he made that statement and was given a very public dressing down by the entire national security cabinet, after which he “remembered” that the President himself had said the Iranians had to totally “dismantle” their nuclear programs, just like Qaddafi did in Libya.

Witkoff is one of many Trump supporters who, while well-meaning, have zero experience or understanding of foreign policy. Just recently, for example, you had Charlie Kirk opining on X that Trump cabinet members and think tankers who opposed a Witkoff-negotiated Iran deal were evil “neo-cons” and “anti-MAGA.”

That kind of talk simply ignores the physics of uranium enrichment, as well as the history of Iran’s forty-year slow walk to a robust nuclear weapons capability.

Charlie Kirk was following on the heels of Tucker Carlson’s hour-long interview with Witkoff in which he blasted the “tremendous pressure for a war on Iran” from the Washington establishment, and heaped praise on Witkoff for his “hope” that dialogue with Iran could clear up “misconceptions” and lead to a full return of Iran to the “league of nations.”

As I relate in my new book, The Iran House: Tales of Revolution, Persecution, War, and Intrigue, the Iranians explicitly designed their nuclear program to be able to manufacture nuclear weapons, using the “legend” of nuclear power to disguise their intentions.

As one Iranian official told me at an international conference where I presented a paper on Iran’s nuclear weapons program already in 1995 (see Chapter 8), the regime intended to “keep its options open” by developing a robust uranium enrichment capability.

If anyone had any doubts as to their intentions – as the US intelligence community continues to harbor – then Exhibit A was Iran’s rejection of a proposal by then-Russian President Boris Yeltsin to give them a 10-year supply of uranium fuel rods for their one nuclear power reactor and to reprocess them in Russia, all for just $30 million.

Instead of taking the deal, the Iranians pursued their plans to master the entire nuclear fuel cycle, building uranium mines, mills to transform the ore into yellowcake, a uranium hexafluoride plant to transform the yellowcake into a gas, and then multiple centrifuge plants to enrich the gas by spinning, efforts which cost them billions of dollars.

Over the years, the Iranians became increasingly skilled at designing newer and faster centrifuges, so that today they can spin up enough lower-enriched uranium to make a nuclear bomb in just one week, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency.

And they have enough lower-enriched uranium currently on hand to make 17 bombs in four months. Seventeen bombs! That’s not a nuclear weapon or two, that is a nuclear arsenal.

Oh, and let’s not forget that to preserve their “civilian” nuclear infrastructure, the Iranian regime has twice – twice – been willing to undergo an international embargo on selling its oil, which cost it $150 billion in lost revenues each time.

If they really had only wanted civilian nuclear power, why would they make such truly awful economic decisions?

No one who subscribes to bad nuclear negotiations has ever answered that question. And people like Charlie Kirk, Tucker Carlson, and Steve Witkoff are probably not even aware of the math.