Yesterday, Senator Tom Cotton appeared on Fox News Sunday. He was asked about the Trump administration’s talks with Iran’s mullahs:
[Witkoff’s] been very clear what President Trump’s position is. Iran cannot have the ability to enrich uranium. That’s really the critical path to getting a nuclear weapon. So they can’t have centrifuges. They can’t enrich uranium at all. Because if you enrich to any level, you can ultimately enrich to weapons-grade levels. That’s the unified position of the American government. That’s been our position for many years. And again, that’s the example of what strong American leadership looked like. That would be a good, strong deal.
Cotton contrasted President Trump’s approach with Barack Obama’s:
Barack Obama’s deal allowed them to have centrifuges and a vast nuclear infrastructure to enrich uranium. What you see here is the difference between, on the one hand, President Trump’s America first approach, which recognizes the mortal threat that a nuclear Iran poses to the United States, and what you might call the blame America first mindset, which blames America for the tensions we have with Iran, says that, well, a bad deal is better than going to war, and that’s our only other choices. That’s what Barack Obama used to say. President Trump rejects that mindset. He believes it’s possible to get a deal with Iran because of the pressure we’ve put on them, because of the economic pressure we’ve put on them, and because frankly the ayatollahs are scared to death of Donald Trump, and they have been for eight years. That’s why they tried to kill him last year on the campaign trail.
Wait, what?! There has been speculation that Iran may have been behind one of the assassination attempts. That has seemed unlikely to me, because who would hire Thomas Crooks to carry out an assassination of world-historical importance? But Cotton is the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and I don’t think he would say baldly that the Iranians “tried to kill him” unless there was a solid basis for it.
