Suzanne Maloney

Alan, murder me?

Thanks so much for having me.

Well, I think at this point we have to be tracking both the language that the Trump administration and the president himself are using, especially on social media.

But we also have to be watching what's happening on the ground because, you know, what we've seen even in the buildup to the war is that the president has often said one thing and done something different.

And that's something that the Iranians are well aware of and very much prepared for now.

And I think he's probably getting different opinions.

And it's not entirely clear that President Trump himself has decided precisely what he wants to do, other than I think it's quite clear that he is trying to bring a close to this war that will enable him to declare victory and to walk away from the conflict.

Well, it was a lot of the same demands that the president and his negotiators had put on the table prior to the war itself.

So he wants a durable commitment to no enrichment, to no nuclear weapons in the program in the future.

He was looking for a number of other steps that the Iranians would take to end their support for proxies, to end their ballistic missile program.

These have all been longstanding concerns on the part of the United States.

They really do date back to even the negotiations that the Obama administration led that produced a deal that temporarily put constraints on a number of Iran's nuclear activities.

And I think what President Trump is trying to achieve is what he's been pushing for throughout both his first and second terms.

And he's not able to achieve conclusively through military action.

The Iranians effectively believe that they have the upper hand at this point in time.

And so they have indicated that they don't really see themselves as prepared to negotiate directly with Washington.

They are embittered, obviously, as a result of the negotiations that were taking place both in the days before the president launched the strikes about a month ago, as well as the same sort of dynamics that preceded the June war.

where negotiations were really just a prelude to military action and in some effect, to some extent, a ruse to dupe the Iranians into complacency, even as the attack was being mobilized.

And so, you know, it's a little bit difficult to get direct diplomacy with Tehran in the best of circumstances.

This is a regime that has