As Vice President JD Vance, Steve Witkoff, and Jared Kushner prepared to head to Islamabad for weekend negotiations, White House Press Secretary Caroline Levitt clarified Tuesday that the ten-point Iranian proposal widely reported in the press as the basis for a ceasefire agreement was in fact discarded immediately as fundamentally unacceptable, and that a different, condensed Iranian counter-proposal was what Trump evaluated and deemed a workable starting point. The president’s red lines, Levitt said, have not changed, and the idea that Trump would accept an Iranian wish list as a deal is completely absurd.
Cliff May, president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and foreign affairs columnist for the Washington Times, joined Dan Proft on Chicago’s Morning Answer to assess what the ceasefire actually represents and what the negotiations are realistically likely to produce.
May offered a framework he said is essential for interpreting not just the current negotiations but the entire campaign: watch what Trump does more than what he says. Trump’s public statements are designed to stimulate reaction, create pressure, and signal intent, and treating them as literal policy declarations leads to confusion. The signal, May said, is the consistent set of objectives the administration has maintained throughout: no Iranian uranium enrichment on Iranian soil, no weapons-grade uranium stockpile in Iranian hands, no missile and drone arsenal sufficient to threaten regional stability, and an open Strait of Hormuz. Those objectives have not changed. The noise is everything else.
On the central substance of the ceasefire, May said the forty days of military operations have genuinely degraded Iran’s capabilities in meaningful ways. Thousands of missiles and drones have been destroyed. The regime’s military and clerical leadership have been decimated across multiple tiers. The nuclear enrichment infrastructure has been severely damaged, with what highly enriched uranium remains buried under rubble at bombed sites. None of that changes the regime’s intentions, which May said have been stated clearly for forty-seven years and cannot be altered by any quantity of bombs. Death to America has been the regime’s explicit and operational goal since 1979, and every capability it built over that period was in service of that goal. What the campaign has done is reduce its ability to act on that goal, not its desire to do so.
He addressed Trump’s threat to destroy Iranian civilization, which May said he criticized in his most recent Washington Times column. His objection was twofold. First, the Iranian people are largely aligned with the West against the regime, and framing the conflict as a civilizational assault plays into the regime’s propaganda. Second, and perhaps more pointedly, the Islamic Republic itself despises pre-Islamic Iranian civilization, viewing it as an age of ignorance. The regime that Trump threatened shares no affinity with Cyrus the Great or any of the traditions of Persian civilization it has spent forty-seven years trying to erase. Despite his discomfort with the rhetoric, May acknowledged that within hours of the threat the regime reversed its position on both the ceasefire and the strait, suggesting the extreme language produced exactly the negotiating leverage it was intended to create.
The highly enriched uranium question is one May said deserves more careful treatment than it has received in public commentary. The material, enriched to approximately sixty percent, is buried under rubble at the bombed nuclear sites rather than sitting on an accessible shelf, which means it is not immediately usable but also cannot be assumed to be permanently out of reach. American and Israeli satellites are watching those sites. The goal is to either retrieve the material, destroy it in place, or transfer it out of Iranian hands as part of any final agreement, but the logistics are complicated by the fact that any ground operation to excavate it would immediately draw IRGC fire. He said this is a core item for the Islamabad negotiations and that the path to resolving it will require careful coordination.
On Kharg Island, which retired General Jack Keane identified as Trump’s ace in the hole, May agreed with the strategic logic while pushing back on the idea of sending amphibious troops to occupy it. He said the more practical approach is simply to declare that no ship may fill up at Kharg Island, and that any vessel attempting to do so will be intercepted before arrival or stopped after departure with its oil cargo seized and sold on the open market, with proceeds potentially going to compensate Gulf states damaged by Iranian attacks or held in escrow for a future Iranian government more amenable to normal relations. The goal is to eliminate the regime’s oil revenue without creating a fixed target for Iranian drone attacks that boots-on-the-ground occupation would provide.
He framed the negotiating period ahead with candid skepticism. The regime, he said, believes correctly based on historical precedent that it has a far better chance of prevailing in diplomatic negotiations than in kinetic warfare. Iran has beaten the United States through diplomacy before, and the people now conducting negotiations on Tehran’s behalf are well aware of that record. The task for the American side is to make absolutely clear that the alternative to a genuine agreement is a return to the bombing campaign, and that the ceasefire represents a pause rather than an end to American military pressure. He said the regime’s current posture, simultaneously claiming victory, trying to insert Lebanon into the ceasefire framework that was never part of the original agreement, and talking about Iranian toll booths in what is legally an international waterway, is exactly the kind of diplomatic maneuvering that has historically allowed the regime to run out the clock on American administrations. The antidote is clarity about consequences.
On NATO, May said he supports the alliance and does not want to see it break apart, noting that a NATO collapse would be Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping’s shared dream and something he is not prepared to contribute to. But he said the current situation has produced a sentence he never expected to say: the Saudis and Emiratis are now better partners to the United States than the French and Spanish. That inversion is a serious problem that requires what he called NATO reform rather than withdrawal. He distinguished between the problematic Western European members, including France, Spain, and Britain, which have been actively unhelpful and in some cases openly hostile, and the eastern flank members, including Poland, Finland, the Baltic states, and to a lesser extent Germany, which have maintained genuine solidarity with American interests and deserve continued American commitment. Punishing the latter for the failures of the former, he said, would be both unjust and strategically self-defeating.