President Trump announced Tuesday that he was delaying a major planned military strike against Iran at the request of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the UAE, and other Gulf State allies, who told him they believed serious negotiations were close to producing a deal and asked for two or three days to allow those discussions to develop. Trump said he was ready to go the following morning with something very big, that he had informed Israel and other regional partners of the decision to pause, and that while previous near-deal moments had fallen apart, this one felt different. He also said that whatever outcome emerges, the media and Democrats will claim America lost the war regardless.
Jed Babbin, former United States Deputy Undersecretary of Defense and contributor to the Washington Times and the American Spectator, joined Dan Proft on Chicago’s Morning Answer to assess whether Trump is right to grant the Gulf States this additional window and what the pause might signal about the administration’s objectives.
Babbin said the fundamental problem with the entire negotiating track, regardless of how many times it is paused and resumed, is that the Iranian regime is never going to voluntarily surrender its nuclear weapons ambitions. That assessment is not about the specific terms being discussed or the quality of any particular proposal. It is about the nature of the regime itself. Any agreement reached will be violated. The only way to permanently eliminate the Iranian nuclear threat is to forcibly disarm a regime that will not disarm itself, which ultimately means either a covert program to overthrow the government or a ground invasion, neither of which is currently on the table. Given that reality, he said, the question of whether to grant Gulf States a few extra days is somewhat academic, since the underlying strategic problem will remain regardless of whether strikes occur this week or next week.
He agreed with Proft’s observation that Trump’s Truth Social post about Democrats and media declaring America the loser no matter what, timed precisely to the announcement of the pause, raises reasonable concerns about what kind of deal the administration might accept. Proft said his instinct is that Trump is looking for a way out and is aware that whatever he gets will be criticized, and is trying to pre-ordain victory before the deal becomes public. Babbin said Trump clearly does want a way out and cannot find one that achieves the stated objectives. He said the war powers resolution pressure building in Congress, with what he called RINOs and others prepared to vote against continuing hostilities, adds to that pressure. But he said he sees no genuine pathway to an acceptable resolution through negotiation, and that eventually the administration will have to decide whether it is willing to pay the cost of actually disarming Iran rather than paper over the problem with an agreement the regime has no intention of honoring.
He said he wrote at the outset of Trump’s second term that the president should have signed a secret presidential directive ordering the CIA to pursue regime change in Iran, and that he does not believe that happened and doubts the CIA has the current capability to execute it even if ordered. He said the gumption required to pursue that option directly has not been demonstrated.
On the Beijing summit post-mortem, Babbin pushed back sharply on analyst George Friedman’s argument that Xi Jinping’s language about peaceful coexistence and steering the China-US relationship forward reflects a genuine evolution away from Maoist revolutionary ideology and toward something closer to corporate statism. Babbin called that analysis full of baloney. He said China remains a revolutionary state, that Xi’s statements are diplomatic performance rather than ideological transformation, and that the clearest signal of Chinese intentions is their continued drive toward Taiwan and their response to Trump’s pause on Taiwan arms sales. He called the arms sales pause a significant win for Xi and said it reverses a commitment Ronald Reagan made in 1982 that the United States would never consult with China before making decisions about arm sales to Taiwan, a promise that had stood for forty-four years.
He said Trump’s imprecise language during and after the summit, which seemed at moments to suggest a world of two superpowers in peaceful coexistence rather than the language of American primacy, was also concerning if taken as reflective of actual strategic thinking rather than off-script improvisation. He said the basic problem with China is not solvable through summitry and nice words, and that the most sobering assessment he can offer about the Taiwan contingency is that if the United States and China go to war over Taiwan, the conflict will be brief, intense, and one the United States is likely to lose, an outcome he called catastrophic for America and for the broader world order.