Barackface: 18: Iran, Trump

Wednesday, June 18, 2025

18: Iran, Trump

Rasmussen has Trump at a 56% approval rating. I believe that is the highest approval rating he has ever had.
— Insurrection Barbie (@DefiyantlyFree) June 18, 2025

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— BJP (@BJP4India) June 18, 2025

🚨 NEW: US B-2 bombers spotted in Israeli airspace (unclear if they're merely training)
— Pyotr Kurzin (@PKurzin) June 18, 2025

Track-II Diplomacy Failures: Why Western Engagement Cannot Reconcile Iranian Sacred Discourse

For more than four decades, the Islamic Republic of Iran has been the subject of tireless efforts by Western actors to build bridges through unofficial channels of diplomacy. These…
— Niels Groeneveld (@nigroeneveld) June 18, 2025

At the heart of this endeavor lies a conviction—repeated across conferences, backchannel meetings, and quiet correspondence—that behind the posturing of Tehran’s regime is a pragmatic core that, if properly engaged, can be persuaded to embrace stability, mutual respect, and even reconciliation. But this view is not only mistaken; it is dangerously naive. The failure of Track-II diplomacy is not the result of poor tactics or clumsy outreach. It is the consequence of a fundamental misreading of the ideological, theological, and strategic architecture that animates the Islamic Republic. ......... The architects of the post-1979 order, particularly Ayatollah Khomeini and his successors, did not view diplomacy as a means of resolving differences among equals. They saw it as a battlefield in the long war for moral and theological supremacy. Iran’s foreign policy is not shaped primarily by material interests or strategic calculations. It is guided by a metaphysical worldview in which Western powers, particularly the United States and Israel, are not sovereign states with whom coexistence is possible, but ontological adversaries whose very existence constitutes an affront to divine order.......... the Islamic Republic does not see Israel as a geopolitical rival to be accommodated. It sees it as an illegitimate and satanic entity that desecrates sacred land and serves as the advance guard of Western spiritual corruption. The call for the destruction of the “Zionist regime” is not a rhetorical excess; it is a theological demand encoded into the very DNA of the regime’s worldview. Engaging Iran in dialogue about “coexistence” with Israel is not just ineffective—it is doctrinally incomprehensible to those who wield power in Tehran. ........ When Iranian representatives return from Track-II meetings, their participation is often repackaged by state media as evidence of Western retreat, desperation, or moral collapse. ........ They reinforce the conviction that the West, exhausted by its own spiritual void and geopolitical missteps, is inching closer to the embrace of Islam—or at least to the abandonment of its own values. .......... they also understand that diplomacy, when untethered from shared metaphysical assumptions, becomes a one-way projection of hopes and illusions. For the Islamic Republic, dialogue is permissible only within the framework of resistance. It is never a step toward reconciliation; it is, at best, a tactic in the broader struggle against what it views as a spiritually diseased civilization. ........ The regime does not compromise on principle. It only adapts its tactics to better pursue its mission. ........... The persistence of Track-II efforts, despite their chronic failure, reflects more about Western psychological and ideological commitments than about Iranian realities. The West, steeped in secular humanism and the belief in rational consensus, struggles to grasp a regime that genuinely views martyrdom as a virtue, sees apocalypse as a gateway to justice, and interprets diplomacy not as bridge-building but as battlefield maneuvering. This misalignment is not merely theoretical. It has consequences for nuclear negotiations, regional stability, and the safety of global Jewish communities, who are often targeted by proxies acting on Iran’s sacred mandates. ........... The tragedy is that it has been pursued under the illusion that words alone can disarm doctrine, that personal rapport can dilute messianic vision, and that time will inevitably civilize a regime that does not want to be civilized.

Opinion: Trump is about to get us into war in Iran President Trump supercharged the latest round of global instability on Monday when he abruptly left the G7 conference currently underway in Canada to address “serious matters” back in Washington. Before convening the National Security Council in the White House Situation Room, Trump ominously warned Iranians to “immediately evacuate” Tehran. Israel’s expanding military operation there had suddenly become America’s top priority........... Trump’s rhetoric escalated on Tuesday, when he issued a call for Iran’s “unconditional surrender” and boasted that “we now have complete and total control” of Iranian airspace, even though the U.S. isn’t a party to the conflict. Trump may not have signed the official order, but he is clearly loving the opportunity to rattle the saber against his favorite foreign foe. ......... Just days after the Pew Research Center published a poll that showed most Americans felt he was too pro-Russia, Trump came out with a string of “blistering” threats aimed squarely at Russian President Vladimir Putin. ......... This week’s Harvard-Harris poll showed Trump underwater with voters on nearly every part of his domestic policy agenda. It is no surprise that he is now considering a hard pivot into foreign policy, an area where voters are more likely to give him the benefit of the doubt. ......... More immediately, a few cruise missiles would distract the media from the bubbling discontent on Capitol Hill, where his “One Big Beautiful Bill” has received a frosty reception in the Senate. ........ that ignores Trump’s evolution into a president with a taste for both military parades and military deployments, even if that means deploying Marines against American citizens on the streets of a major city. In Los Angeles, Trump is openly testing the limits of his constitutional power. .......... In Trump’s own words, expanding the Israel-Iran conflict makes Tehran more likely to sign an American nuclear deal. Trump now sounds more like Dick Cheney than his first-term isolationist self.

Xi Jinping breaks silence on Israel-Iran conflict as China warns citizens