April 15: JCPOA 2.0?
Feds freeze Harvard funds; Dan Caldwell on leave from Pentagon; Mohsen Mahdawi's martyrdom
The Big Story
There’s a risk in writing about the Trump administration’s nuclear negotiations with Iran: Whatever we say may be obsolete within 30 minutes of publication due to some new comment from somebody in U.S. officialdom, not least the president himself. Compare that to Joe Biden, whose administration, whatever else you could say about it, was so drearily predictable on the Iran file that we could generally guess the next steps before they even happened. Nevertheless, we persist.
So what’s happened since yesterday? First, we got a little more (alleged) detail on this weekend’s talks in Oman. According to reports in Israel Hayom and The Guardian—and contrary to public statements from hawkish administration figures like National Security Advisor Mike Waltz—the Trump administration is not raising the issue of Iran’s ballistic missile program or its support for regional terrorist groups. Per Israel Hayom:
[The U.S. negotiating team] demanded a complete dismantling of all military-related nuclear capabilities but did not object to civilian nuclear use. They also insisted on strict and ongoing oversight of Iran's remaining nuclear facilities, not only by the International Atomic Energy Agency but by an additional U.S. or international body, at least for the first years of any agreement.
The Guardian reported, meanwhile, that the United States was proposing that Iran transfer its highly enriched uranium to a third country, likely Russia—a demand that the Iranians are “expected” to resist.
But the big news last night came from U.S. envoy Steve Witkoff, who said this during an interview with Fox’s Sean Hannity:
The president’s message of peace through strength, it resonates throughout the world. … The president means what he says, which is, they [the Iranians] cannot have a bomb. The conversation with the Iranians will be much about two critical points. One, enrichment. As you mentioned, they do not need to enrich [uranium] past 3.67%. In some circumstances they are 60% and in other circumstances 20%. That cannot be. And you do not need to run, as they claim, a “civil nuclear program,” where you’re enriching past 3.67%.
So this is going to be much about verification on the enrichment program and then, ultimately, verification on weaponization. That includes missiles … and it includes the trigger for a bomb.
Witkoff’s comments prompted substantial hair-pulling, head-scratching, and cries of lamentation from fans of Trump’s first-term Iran policy. Why? Because the 3.67% enrichment limit, paired with “verification,” was taken directly from the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, aka Obama’s Iran deal. The position taken by Witkoff in the interview, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies’ Mark Dubowitz wrote on X, represented a “collapse” of the U.S. negotiating position and a return to the “Obama baseline.” Dubowitz went on to speculate that “Obama-Biden advisers”—perhaps Brett McGurk, Biden’s National Security Council coordinator for the Middle East—were “consulting with Trump’s Iran team,” i.e., Witkoff. How else to explain Witkoff’s embrace of Obama zombie talkers, not to mention his office’s reputed friendliness with Barak Ravid, the Biden administration’s media messenger of choice for all things Middle East?
Then it was the turn of the “Restraintists” to tear their hair out. We don’t know if someone gave Witkoff a talking-to or what, but in a Tuesday morning X post, the envoy appeared to completely reverse his take on the enrichment question:
A deal with Iran will only be completed if it is a Trump deal. Any final arrangement must set a framework for peace, stability, and prosperity in the Middle East—meaning that Iran must stop and eliminate its nuclear enrichment and weaponization program. It is imperative for the world that we create a tough, fair deal that will endure, and that is what President Trump has asked me to do.
Okay, so … no enrichment. And if we assume the conventional wisdom that Iran would prefer war to concessions on enrichment is correct, well … here’s Economist defense editor Shashank Joshi:
That is to say, we’re back to where we were two weeks ago—at least until someone throws another curveball.
—Park MacDougald
The Rest
→The Trump administration on Monday announced a freeze of $2.26 billion in federal grants and contracts to Harvard University, hours after the university said it would not comply with a list of the administration’s demands for “reform.” In a Friday letter, the government had accused the university of failing to “live up to the intellectual and civil rights conditions that justify federal investment” and proposed a sweeping set of reforms akin to those accepted by Columbia University last month, including the termination of DEI programs, a shift to “merit-based” hiring and admissions, an audit for “viewpoint diversity,” and an audit of academic departments with “egregious records of antisemitism and other bias.” Harvard, unlike Columbia, told the administration to go jump in a lake. In a Monday letter, the university’s lawyers, including former Special Counsel Robert Hur, alleged that the White House’s demands were unlawful and promised that “the university will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional [First Amendment] rights.” The nod to free speech is nice and stirring and all, but we’d be remiss if we didn’t note that in the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education’s 2025 Free Speech rankings, Harvard finished last out of 254 schools, with a score of 0.00 out of 100.
→On that note, George Mason law professor David Bernstein explains why we shouldn’t cry ourselves to sleep over the fate of America’s richest and most prestigious university:
→Yemeni militias backed by the United Arab Emirates and U.S. military contractors are planning a ground offensive to push the Houthis out of parts of the Red Sea coast, The Wall Street Journal reports. According to U.S. and Yemeni officials who spoke to the Journal, the UAE in recent weeks floated a plan for militias aligned with the internationally recognized government of Yemen, which is backed by the Emiratis and the Saudis, to “deploy their forces up the Houthi-controlled western Yemeni coast and try to seize the Red Sea port of Hodeidah.” The report notes that unnamed “private American security contractors” have been advising the militias on the potential operation, which would initially be backed by the UAE but not by Saudi Arabia. U.S. officials said that Washington is “open” to supporting the offensive but has not yet decided whether to do so.
→Dan Caldwell, a top aide to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and one of the leading Koch-affiliated “realists” within the Department of Defense, was escorted out of the Pentagon and placed on administrative leave on Tuesday for an alleged “unauthorized disclosure,” Reuters reports. It’s not clear what Caldwell is accused of leaking, but according to the report, he was identified as part of an investigation launched on March 21 by Hegseth’s chief of staff, Joe Kasper, into “recent unauthorized disclosures of national security information involving sensitive communications.” The Kasper memo was dated three days prior to The Atlantic’s publication of its story on what would come to be known as “Signalgate.” Caldwell is close to Hegseth—they worked together at an earlier Koch-backed group, Concerned Veterans for America, and Hegseth named Caldwell as his point of contact for the Houthi small group discussion in the Signal leaks—but he also appears to be out of step with his boss’s policy priorities in the Middle East. Hegseth has been one of the more hawkish figures in the administration when it comes to countering to Iran, whereas Caldwell is a card-carrying “Restraintist.”
→On Monday, officers from Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested Mohsen Mahdawi, a Palestinian graduate student at Columbia, at a citizenship interview in Burlington, Vermont. Like his friend Mahmoud Khalil, Mahdawi, a philosophy student at Columbia’s School of General Studies, was a leader of the anti-Israel campus protests at Columbia, serving as copresident of Columbia’s Palestinian Students Union. Columbia professor Shai Davidai even captured him telling a crowd at an unauthorized campus protest last January that “nothing is more honorable than dying for a noble cause.” The Arab Street comes to America! Ho hum. The weird thing about Mahdawi is how he came to be in the United States in the first place. He was the subject of multiple profiles, including a two-part series in Valley News and a 2018 profile in the student newspaper of Lehigh University, all of which have apparently been scrubbed from the internet. But an archived version of the latter indicates that Mahdawi participated in at least some form of Palestinian militancy as a young man and that he obtained a visa to enter the United States—ostensibly to visit his American girlfriend—by cutting through a barbwire fence to enter Israel, sprinting to the U.S. embassy for a visa, and sweet-talking an Israeli guard into helping him discreetly enter Jordan, despite having illegally entered Israel. Mahdawi also appears to have family ties to terrorist groups. From a report in The Washington Free Beacon:
In August, Mahdawi posted pictures to his Instagram account honoring the “martyrdom” of his “cousin,” Maysara Masharqa, who served as a prominent field commander in the military wing of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade. Mahdawi praised Masharqa as a “fierce resistance fighter” who had been fighting since he was 17, adding that he spent seven years in an Israeli prison.
“Here is Mesra who offers his soul as a sacrifice for the homeland and for the blood of the martyrs as a gift for the victory of Gaza and in defense of the dignity of his homeland and his people against the vicious Israeli occupation in the West Bank,” Mahdawi wrote in the post.
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If Witkoff is not an intentional distraction, Trump should take him off the case.
Taxpayers should never fund universities, especially the ivies. Ridiculous.