Monday, June 16, 2025

Too Late, Says Trump? – HotAir

June 16, 2025
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Too Late, Says Trump? – HotAir
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Talk about missing the point. The same geniuses who got caught with their pants down over the last four days think that Israel’s had enough. And they’re betting that the US may want to stop the war quickly enough for Iran’s regime to recover … including their nuclear programs. 





Imma stop you right there, Ali.

The Wall Street Journal reported just a few minutes ago that the regime wants to call a time out and return to the table, while offering nothing new at all:

Iran has been urgently signaling that it seeks an end to hostilities and resumption of talks over its nuclear programs, sending messages to Israel and the U.S. via Arab intermediaries, Middle Eastern and European officials said.

In the midst of a ferocious Israeli air campaign, Tehran has told Arab officials they would be open to returning to the negotiating table as long as the U.S. doesn’t join the attack, the officials said. They also passed messages to Israel saying it is in the interest of both sides to keep the violence contained.

But with Israeli warplanes able to fly freely over the capital and Iranian counterattacks inflicting minimal damage, Israeli leaders have little incentive to halt their assault before doing more to destroy Iran’s nuclear sites and further weaken the theocratic government’s hold on power.

True enough. So what incentives are the Iranians offering? Er …

Tehran appears to be betting that Israel can’t afford to get stuck in a war of attrition and would have to seek a diplomatic solution eventually, Arab diplomats who have spoken with the Iranians said. Iranian officials said they thought Israel lacked a clear exit strategy and would need U.S. help to do meaningful damage to targets such as the Fordow uranium-enrichment facility, which is buried under a mountain. …

Iran has told Arab officials it could accelerate its nuclear program and expand the scope of the war if there are no prospects of resuming talks with the U.S.

There is no indication Iran is ready to make new concessions in nuclear talks, the Arab intermediaries said. The diplomatic effort led by the Trump administration was stalled over Iran’s refusal to stop enriching uranium before the talks were cut short by Israel’s attacks last week.





So … Iran thinks the Israelis are getting too tired to continue? Is this a rope-a-dope strategy by Tehran? Or what’s left of Tehran? 

This is simply and completely unserious. They may believe they can peel Donald Trump away from Benjamin Netanyahu, but that was what they thought before last week, too. The Iranian regime figured that they could stall through talks until they built a few nuclear weapons and then changed the game by either revealing or using them, likely through their Houthi proxies. And it appears that they still think this strategy will work even after last week’s events proved that no one was buying their blizzard of bull***t?

Come on, man. 

Iran simply doesn’t have leverage left in this situation. Israel controls its skies, and the IDF is systematically dismantling the one offensive ability that the IRGC still has — its ballistic missiles. Rather than prioritize destruction of missile inventory, they are going after the launchers. The IDF estimates that a third of them have been destroyed already, and that’s already having a major impact on Iranian attacks:

IDF Chief Spokesman Brig.-Gen. Effie Defrin on Monday announced that the air force has destroyed a third of Iran’s ballistic missile launchers, 120 in total.

Each launcher could have fired dozens of missiles over the course of the current war.

The Islamic Republic was only able to fire around half of the missiles it had intended to fire overnight, said Defrin.

This means that for the rest of the war, Iran’s ability to launch more missiles at once will be reduced by at least a third, if not more, given that during the overnight attack, Tehran’s firing capability was reduced by around half.





Furthermore, the Iranians can’t leverage the nuclear threat if they can’t access their nuclear facilities. The threat of ramping up those activities is a serious miscalculation by Tehran; it reminds everyone why destroying these facilities is essential now. (Duane will focus on Fordow in the next post.) That threat might well convince Trump to strike Fordow with the bomber-required heavy bunker-buster munitions necessary for its destruction. Israel may be able to essentially cut off access to the site by other means, but the continued Iranian threat of nuclear-weapons production might get everyone in the region on board with an American intervention specifically targeting the hardened facilities for weapons development. 

In the meantime, Israel is now explicitly aiming to collapse the regime. Defense Minister Israel Katz warned that the IDF will target Iranian state television to remove its propaganda efforts, and the IDF sent out a warning to Tehranis to evacuate certain parts of the city ASAP:

Israel is expected to target Iranian state television, with Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz saying that the “Iranian propaganda and incitement mouthpiece is on its way to disappearing,” adding that the evacuation of the surrounding residences has begun. 

At the same time, IDF Spokesperson in Arabic, Avichay Adraee, issued an evacuation warning in Persian to the residents of the third district of Tehran in a social media post on Monday.

The third district contains much of the regime’s official government offices. The IDF may think valuable assets are hiding there, and could be conducting targeted attacks such as those seen in Beirut last year that killed Hassan Nasrallah and what was left of Hezbollah leadership and financing after Operation Grim Beeper. However, they may be aiming to put an end to any command and control capacity left in Tehran, even civic command and control. That would free Tehranis to rise up against what’s left of the mullahs’ regime and liberate themselves. 





If Ali Khamenei wants to talk his way out of the trap he sprung on himself, he’s going to have to do better than demanding a do-over. Meanwhile, the propagandists just found out what the FO means in FAFO.

There isn’t any translation yet available for that transmission, but the message got through to the Iranians watching, loudly and clearly. And this was the aftermath:

I suspect that the televised hit was a first shot, intended to force an evacuation. It didn’t seem powerful enough to cause the scenes we see above.

Update: It doesn’t sound like Trump is all that interested in talks at the moment. He’s still leaving the door open, but …





He tried to warn them. For sixty days. They’re going to have to come up with a better offer, at the very least. 

By the way, Iranian state TV is now off the air, and one of their reporters is trying to spin it as a sign of strength:

They had told us to evacuate the eastern sector, but everyone stayed until the last moment—to show the world the image of Iran’s strength, which is exactly what the Zionist regime doesn’t want.

And because they didn’t want that, they struck IRIB. What happens next? You’ll see something even worse.”

Yes, the regime certainly will. 


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