00:00There is this perception out there that President Trump's, you know, the negotiations you mentioned were going quite smoothly.
00:08President Trump's advisers, some of his diplomats, were cautioning against the military option.
00:14And yet one ally, namely Israel, convinced him that that was the only way forward.
00:20How influential do you think that visit by Prime Minister Netanyahu back in February was in shaping President Trump's final
00:30opinion on this matter?
00:31Well, it gave him military options.
00:33But we actually know in detailed public briefings that Steve Whitcoff has given as to how the nuclear talks unfolded,
00:41that Israel played almost no role in the actual decision to go to war.
00:48It played a minor role in the timing of it.
00:50But what really determined Trump for war was the fact that the Iranian negotiators in Geneva, after having previously said
01:00they could build 11 bombs whenever they wanted to, and they said they had the enriched uranium ready to do
01:06that.
01:08Trump was told that the Iranians had tabled an offer that they would not give to the Americans in writing,
01:15and that would allow them to enrich an unlimited amount of uranium to 20 percent purity, which is well in
01:22excess of the ordinary civilian needs of a civilian nuclear power program.
01:28This convinced Trump that the Iranians were lying, and that they had no intention of complying with any kind of
01:35a deal, and that the best that Trump could get was something that was not much better than Barack Obama's
01:422016 nuclear deal.
01:43And this really does seem to have been a colossal miscalculation on Iran's part, because the way in which they
01:51presented this offer really did convince Trump that there was no prospect for negotiations, and that the mediators were spinning
02:00a public tale that wasn't true.
02:03And so it's now actually clear that the US government thought that the Iranian government was deceiving them.
02:11And of course, we also know the Iranian government thought the same thing about the US government.
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