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Chapter 1: What challenges did Trump face in negotiating with Iran?
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This podcast was produced on the lands of the Wabakal and Gadigal people. If you happen to be wandering through just the right corridor of the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York City on the 18th of September 2013, you would have seen quite a bizarre sight. Two high-ranking American diplomats desperately trying to rip a framed photograph off the wall. The officials were these two men.
Bill Burns is someone who has worked on the Iran issue for several years. Jake Sullivan is someone who is really widely respected at the White House and at the State Department.
They would later go on to become CIA director and national security advisor in the Biden administration. But at this particular moment, their main concern was getting this picture off the wall. Outside, the streets of New York were filled with protests against the Iranian regime. They were there to denounce the new president of Iran, Hassan Rouhani.
This man Rouhani has an enormous amount of blood on his hands. There is no chance that the regime is going to give up its quest for nuclear weapons.
But secretly, there at the Waldorf Astoria, Burns and Sullivan were set to meet with Rouhani's advisers and try and convince them to do just that. get the Iranian regime to give up its quest for nuclear weapons.
The trouble was, just as the advisers arrived, the Americans realised that on the wall outside their meeting room was a giant photograph of the last Shah of Iran visiting the Waldorf in the 1970s. A giant image of the man the Iranian regime hated more than any other person on Earth. The man they had overthrown in 1979. Seeing his picture next to the meeting room could seriously offend them.
Burns and Sullivan, in a panic, began tugging at the frame, only to find that it had been bolted to the wall. The relevant question here is, why did they care? Why were they worried about offending the Iranians?
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Chapter 2: How did the 2013 negotiations with Iran differ from today?
He was the guy at the Waldorf Astoria ignoring the picture of the Shah. He was also in Vienna, although I can't tell if he actually went on the Sound of Music bus tour. Eragchi had climbed the mountain of Iran's foreign ministry and was now in charge of it. And so he was Iran's best person to negotiate another deal.
He started meeting with Donald Trump's representatives, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner in Oman.
But partway through that process, Iran's key nuclear enrichment facilities have been completely and totally obliterated.
US and Israeli jets flew into Iran and bombed the enrichment facilities that Araghchi had spent more than a decade negotiating over. He was stunned.
They had perhaps this plan and they just needed negotiations perhaps to cover it up. We don't know how we can trust them anymore. What they did was, in fact, a betrayal to diplomacy.
Despite this setback, negotiations continued. And in late February 2026, Araghchi was sitting at the negotiation table with Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner again in Switzerland when... We have hit hundreds of targets.
in Iran, including Revolutionary Guard facilities. Americans will never have to face a radical, bloodthirsty terrorist regime armed with nuclear weapons and lots of threats. And yet the talks somehow continued.
Arachi has been continuing to meet with Trump's representatives to try and negotiate an end to the war. But despite multiple rounds, there's one big sticking point.
Both sides appear to remain at odds over Iran's nuclear program and stockpile of enriched uranium.
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