President Donald Trump’s administration appears unconcerned with the Islamic Republic of Iran’s gloating and insults about the peace plan signed this month, but is willing to make serious threats when Tehran negotiators consider breaking the agreement.
Iranian leaders seem to have zero fear that trash-talking the Americans could blow up their memorandum of understanding with the United States — routinely characterizing it as a victory for the Islamic Republic and a disgrace for the U.S. This brazen attitude could not have been any clearer than in remarks on Wednesday from Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the head of the Iranian negotiating team, while speaking at a conference in Azerbaijan.
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“The Islamabad understanding was not the result of pressure and coercion, but rather the result of the resistance and authority of the brave Iranian nation,” Ghalibaf said. “That is why the Islamabad memorandum of understanding became a declaration of America’s defeat.”
Jacob Olidort, chief research officer and director for American security policy at the Make America Great Again-aligned America First Policy Institute, told the Washington Examiner that pot shots and narrative-spinning have always been expected from Tehran’s leaders, “as long as it materially doesn’t change … what the agreement is, what their responsibilities are.”
“This is in line with what the regime has been doing all along. They will try to twist anything to be part of their disinformation, really about anything being a victory for them,” Olidort said — adding that when those statements call into question the actual expectations of the agreement, “the president has been very consistent and clear in responding and really discrediting those characterizations.”
When the Iranian side indicated over the weekend that it would resume blocking the Strait of Hormuz in response to Israeli attacks in Lebanon, Trump issued a series of statements to the press that seemed to threaten both bombings and kidnapping the Iranian delegation.
“You close [the Strait], and you won’t have a country,” Trump told Fox News. “You won’t even make it back to your f***ing country.”
When Vice President JD Vance announced that inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency would be granted access to monitor Iran’s nuclear program, Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmail Baghaei told reporters in Tehran: “We did not have a meeting with IAEA Chief Rafael Grossi in Switzerland, nor do we plan to allow its inspectors to visit nuclear facilities damaged in the recent conflicts.”
Grossi stepped in on Wednesday to clarify that his agency will, in fact, be inspecting the Iranian nuclear program regardless of the “war of words” between Tehran and Washington.
“I can understand political statements, they are part of the reality, but the fundamental thing I would like to remind you and draw your attention to is that there has been a memorandum of understanding, signed by both presidents,” Grossi said, pointing out that the memorandum “says explicitly that the nuclear activities that are going to be carried out with regards to the nuclear material facilities will be supervised by the IAEA.”
He added, “Obviously, to do that, we will have to inspect. Whether this happens the day after tomorrow or in one week or in 10 days, it’s important but not essential. This is going to happen.”
Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Wednesday that, when it comes to rolling out this memorandum of understanding, he is uninterested in anything other than the regime’s actions and is prepared to act if they flinch from their “straight-up commitments.”
“What matters is what they do or they don’t do,” he told reporters in Kuwait. “They either do the things they claim — and agreed to do — or they don’t. And if they do it, then great, we’ll keep moving forward. And if they don’t, the president has been clear about what’s going to happen and what could happen.”
A U.S. official told the Washington Examiner: “As Vice President Vance, Secretary Rubio and the rest of the President’s administration have repeatedly said, we only care about action from the Iranians. Propaganda spread by Iran’s tightly-controlled state media is simply a face-saving attempt directed toward the domestic Iranian audience. To that point, it is shameful that the American mainstream media has been hell-bent on parroting said propaganda in a brazen attempt to attack the President and derail his peace process.”
Iran has in recent days floated the idea of instituting a charge for passage through the Strait of Hormuz once the 60-day window of the MOU elapses. Rubio says they’re dreaming.
“When we mean ‘open the straits,’ we mean ‘open the straits free,'” Rubio said. “I know of no country on the planet that supports tolling or a fee for the use of the straits. That’s not going to happen. The president has been abundantly clear.”
