April 14: Witkoff Meets the Iranians

Saudi nukes?; A semiconductor tariff exemption?; Schizo attacks Josh Shapiro

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The Big Story

On Saturday, a team of U.S. negotiators led by Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff met with an Iranian delegation in Muscat, Oman, to begin talks over Iran’s nuclear program. As to the much-debated question of whether the talks would be “direct” or “indirect,” the two sides appear to have split the baby. “Iranian and U.S. envoys negotiated from separate rooms at a highly secured palatial compound,” according to The Wall Street Journal, but Witkoff and Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi ended the talks with a “brief face-to-face discussion.”

U.S. officials have been tight-lipped about the discussions, with President Donald Trump telling reporters on Sunday that “nothing matters until you get it done, so I don’t like to talk about it.” Both sides have said that the early talks are aimed at building “trust” for further negotiations and aren’t necessarily about hashing out specific terms. Still, according to the same report in the Journal, the Iranians have yet to offer much, despite “losing their shirts” over the past year, as Iran analyst Phillip Smyth put it to us earlier this month. Tehran is demanding sanctions relief and the unfreezing of its assets held abroad as a precondition for a return to the nuclear framework of the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, which Trump abandoned in 2018. The Iranians are also leaking that Witkoff et al. are offering them concessions. From a report in Amwaj Media (emphasis ours):

Speaking on condition of anonymity, a senior Iranian political source with knowledge of proceedings said Witkoff brought a draft that did not refer to the “dismantling” of Iran’s nuclear program—nor an explicit threat of military attack if negotiations go awry. Mindful of Tehran’s strong rejection of a Libya-style abandonment of its nuclear capabilities and demand that Trump cease his threats of military action, the claimed U.S. stance is likely to have aided progress in Muscat.

That claim could well be be bogus. But it does echo remarks that Witkoff made to the Journal in an interview published on Friday. In it, Witkoff said that while Washington’s opening position was the “dismantlement” of Iran’s nuclear program, its “red line” was preventing the “weaponization” of the Iranian nuclear program—suggesting that the United States might allow Iran to continue enriching uranium in some capacity. On the other hand, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told Fox’s Maria Bartiromo on Sunday that the Iranians must “negotiate [a] full dismantlement of [their] nuclear capabilities,” or else they will share the fate of the Houthis.

We know that Iran will not—and likely cannot, due to the nature of its regime—offer major concessions on any of the administration’s demands, such as dismantling its nuclear program, abandoning its ballistic missile program, and ceasing its support for its terrorist proxies. And we know that Iran has less leverage now than at any point in the past decade. The country is broke, its currency is collapsing, it recently lost its only state ally, its proxies have either been crippled or are under heavy pressure, its government is heavily penetrated by Israeli intelligence, and it cannot defend its airspace. At the moment, the only card the Iranian regime has left to play is to bluff and to hope that the Trump administration chooses to bail it out by resurrecting the JCPOA in exchange for approximately nothing.

This is, we suspect, why the pro-Iranian messaging machine is kicking into overdrive all of a sudden. “Neocons” want U.S. “boots on the ground” in Tehran! “Zionists” are demanding another “regime change war” on behalf of the Christian-murdering settler state! “Warmongers” are slandering the brilliant diplomatic efforts of Mr. Witkoff! MAGA!

So what’s the administration’s position? Only Trump’s opinion matters here, and this is what the president had to say on Monday:

Iran has to get rid of the concept of a nuclear weapon. They cannot have a nuclear weapon. I want them to be a rich, great nation. The only thing is, one thing, simple, it’s really simple: They can’t have a nuclear weapon. And they’ve gotta go fast. Because they’re fairly close to having one. And they’re not going to have one. And if we have to do something very harsh, we’ll do it.

He added, of the Iranians “I think they’re tapping us along because they were so used to dealing with stupid people in this country.”

—Park MacDougald

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The Rest

→Post of the Day, “What Did the President Mean By This?” Edition:

The first layer of the joke is this poster thinks that Trump endorsing a pro-Israel book by a friendly journalist is a “damn psy-op to divide MAGA.” The second layer is the idea that the psy-op is intended to smear, uh, MAGA hero Dave Smith, who wrote on March 19, 2024, that Trump is “a war criminal who should spend his life in prison, as I’ve said countless times.”

→Energy Secretary Chris Wright announced Sunday that the Trump administration was reviving talks with Saudi Arabia that could provide the kingdom with a “pathway” to a nuclear program. During a trip to Riyadh, Wright announced that the United States and Saudi Arabia had agreed to a nonbinding memorandum of understanding to “identify areas in all fields of energy in which collaboration would advance the mutual interest and shared strategic goals of each participant.” Part of that collaboration, Wright explained in a press conference, could involve the United States sharing its nuclear technology and allowing uranium “enrichment here in Saudi Arabia.” Saudi Arabia’s current ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, has said that the kingdom will be forced to pursue its own nuclear weapons if Iran is ever able to acquire them. The worry, of course, is if the White House is considering allowing Riyadh to enrich as part of a deal that would also allow Iran to do so.

→On Friday, the Trump administration “exempted” semiconductors, smartphones, laptops, and other finished electronics from the 145% tariff on imports from China … for now, sort of. In a Sunday post on Truth Social, Trump said there was no “exception” announced Friday and that the electronics had merely been moved to a different tariff “bucket,” i.e., the 20% “fentanyl tariffs” imposed by a February executive order under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. “We are taking a look at Semiconductors and the WHOLE ELECTRONICS SUPPLY CHAIN in the upcoming National Security Tariff Investigations,” the president wrote. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said Sunday that tariffs on these goods would “ultimately be decided through an industry-specific tariff model focused on the semiconductor supply chain and imposed via Section 232, which governs national security-related tariffs,” according to a paraphrase from The Washington Post. That’s important because, as several commentators pointed out over the weekend, exempting finished consumer goods while tariffing foreign raw materials, capital goods, and other inputs would inadvertently cripple American manufacturing.

→What is the Trump administration demanding in trade talks? An excerpt from a Sunday report in The Washington Post:

Chief among the expected demands is for countries such as Vietnam and Mexico to no longer serve as intermediate stops for Chinese firms and products seeking to evade U.S. tariffs—a practice that has alarmed officials in both parties.

The United States will be focused on ensuring that “goods from Vietnam are actual Vietnamese goods,” said Daniel Kishi, a policy adviser at American Compass, a center-right think tank. Kishi said the Trump team is likely to push other countries to match their tariffs on China with the rates the United States applies to China and synchronize their use of other tools to prevent China from controlling supply chains in critical sectors.

→Stat of the Day: 90%

That’s China’s share of global rare earths processing capacity, according to data from the International Energy Agency published in a March report in the Financial Times. In response to Trump’s tariffs, China has halted the exports of rare earths and rare-earth magnets—which are critical in automobile and semiconductor manufacturing, as well as in other strategic industries, such as defense and aerospace. China has a little under half of the world’s rare earths deposits but dominates the global market for refining, smelting, and processing, an expensive and highly polluting process that is often unprofitable for Western firms to invest in without the sort of state support enjoyed by their Chinese rivals. Outside of Japan, which began stockpiling materials after being subject to a Chinese export ban in 2010, Western companies are heavily reliant on Chinese-dominated supply chains. As a weekend report in The New York Times notes, “Many American companies keep little or no inventory because they do not want to tie up cash in stockpiles of costly materials.”

→Image of the Day:

That’s the inside of the Pennsylvania Governor’s Mansion in Harrisburg, following a break-in and arson early Sunday morning that forced Gov. Josh Shapiro and his family to evacuate. According to local police, the suspect, Cody Balmer, 38, jumped a fence outside the residence, evaded the governor’s security detail, entered the mansion, and then started the fire with Molotov cocktails. Balmer fled, then called police to turn himself in, confessing his “ill feelings” toward Shapiro and explaining that he had intended to “beat [Shapiro] with a small sledgehammer” if he found him, according to the Associated Press. In Facebook postings over the years, Balmer had described himself as a “registered socialist” and posted anarchist and antifa-related content, though it’s not yet clear if there was a genuine political motive to the attack. Balmer’s mother told the AP that he had “bipolar disorder and schizophrenia” and “wasn’t taking his medicine.”

→Mario Vargas Llosa, the Nobel Prize-winning Peruvian novelist-cum-politician, died on Sunday in Lima, Peru. Along with Gabriel García Márquez (whom Llosa once punched in the face) and Jorge Luis Borges, Llosa was a major figure in the “Latin American boom,” when Spanish-language literature from the continent first entered the global canon. He started, like Mérquez, on the revolutionary left but later became disillusioned with Marxism and ran for president of Peru as a (classical) liberal in 1990, losing to Alberto Fujimori. Llosa was a prolific writer, and we won’t pretend to have read all of his works, but we can strongly recommend two of his historical novels: 1981’s The War of the End of the World, about a real-life millenarian peasant revolt in late-19th century Brazil, and 2000’s The Feast of the Goat, about the Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo.

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