Trump regime officials tell Axios that they’ve informed Iranian regime officials that no, fuck no, they will not move the planned Friday meeting in Istanbul to Oman nor will they unvite other regional powers to the summit or limit the topics to just the nuclear shit and exclude larger issues.
“We told them it is this or nothing, and they said, ‘Ok, then nothing,'” an official told Axios, with another adding “We want to reach a real deal quickly or people will look at other options,” which should be understood as a willingness on Team Trump’s part to Give War a Chance… Again.
The wacky part of this is that the two absolutely domineering titans of diplomacy Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner couldn’t simply intimidate the Iranians into bending to their will. And yeah the rote sarcasm of the previous sentence seems a little dissonant with the much more straightforward if colloquial construction of the prior passages of this brief but it had to be fit in somewhere here.