Senior Trump administration officials, speaking on a call with reporters Tuesday, defended the decision to authorize strikes against Iranian targets, asserting that diplomatic efforts had reached an impasse due to what they characterized as Iranian intransigence. The officials, granted anonymity, claimed the administration had pursued a deal to curtail Iran’s nuclear program but encountered deliberate obstruction.
According to one senior official, the administration sought a comprehensive agreement, potentially exceeding the parameters of the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) – often referred to as the “Obama deal” – but Iran consistently avoided substantive engagement. “We really thought that they would present real movement toward creating a real deal, but all we got were games and tricks and denials,” the official stated. The official alleged Iran’s strategy was to prolong negotiations until after the end of the Trump presidency, hoping for a more favorable outcome under a different administration.
The officials described a final round of negotiations in Geneva as unproductive. They claimed to have informed President Trump that achieving a satisfactory agreement would require months of further talks, with no guarantee of success. “So basically, we came back to the president, we said, ‘Look, if you want us to make, you know, a deal, like an Obama kind of deal, maybe it would be an Obama-plus deal, we could probably receive one done. It would take months,’” the official recounted.
The administration’s frustration, as relayed by the officials, stemmed from a perception that Iran was not genuinely interested in a quick resolution. “These guys definitely were not looking to make a quick deal,” the official said. “And if you’re asking us at the end of the day if we’re going to look at you and say we’ve actually solved the issue, I said look, it’s going to take a lot for us to get there. Because they’re basically playing games with us all over the place. It’s just very, very slippery.”
The officials maintained that the administration remained open to diplomacy, but insisted that Iran’s actions demonstrated a lack of willingness to negotiate in good faith. “We said, ‘Look, if you decide that you want to do diplomacy, we’ll go, we’ll push as hard as possible, we’ll get in the room, we’ll fight for every point that People can.’ But these guys, they just really were showing that they didn’t want to, that they weren’t willing to make the type of deal that President Trump would have been satisfied with.”
President Trump, according to a C-SPAN report, has publicly stated that Iran ignored warnings not to rebuild its nuclear program. The administration has not yet detailed the specific targets struck in the recent military action, nor has it outlined a clear path forward beyond the strikes. No immediate response from Iranian officials has been publicly released.
