OP-ED: Trump diplomats blunder into war
Did Steve Wittkoff and Jared Kushner blow it?
The friend and son-in-law respectively of Donald Trump were negotiating with the Iranian government on a new nuclear deal when U.S. and Israeli bombs began bolting from the skies above that country’s military and security installations; in one instance, a wayward Tomahawk missile slammed into a girls’ school, killing scores of children. An Israeli strike took out Iran’s supreme leader, the cleric and foe of the United States, Ali Khamenei.
Weeks out from the initial attacks, the war continues with attendant consequences, including a dramatic spike in the price of gas here at home. The Strait of Hormuz remains blocked to most commercial traffic. The president is bickering with America’s skeptical European allies and others (Japan, South Korea) over naval help to clear the Strait. Israel has spread the war into Lebanon, the home of the Iranian-affiliated paramilitary group, Hezbollah, creating a humanitarian nightmare for the millions trying to flee to safety.
Meanwhile, Iran’s neighbors have been subjected to Iranian drone attacks. This includes the touristy United Arab Emirates and its capital city, ultra-rich Dubai.
In addition to Americans paying more at the pump, the Trump administration is expending some $900 million a day to prosecute the war. A total of 13 U.S. service personnel have died, including six in the crash of an Air Force refueling plane in Iraq.
About the only country benefiting from the Iranian war is Russia. Alarmed by the worldwide fuel crisis, the Trump administration temporarily lifted sanctions on the Putin government. Increased demand along with higher oil prices are refilling Russian coffers, further enabling Moscow’s war against Ukraine.
President Trump assigns a new justification for the war almost daily. Regime change, freedom for the millions of Iranians yearning for the rule of law and democracy, destruction of the Iranian security apparatus and military, demolition of that country’s missile development efforts, ensuring Iranian leaders are never able to wrap their fingers around the nuclear trigger.
The latter rationale brings us back to Kushner and Wittkoff – Wittkoff in particular.
The Arms Control Association recently published a blog by nuclear nonproliferation expert Kelsey Davenport, in which she claimed Wittkoff’s amateurish diplomacy and insufficient technical knowhow fed President Trump’s impatience for an agreement and led the way to war.
She notes that “48 hours” before the Israeli and U.S. attacks, Wittkoff and Kushner met with Iran’s foreign minister Abbas Araghchi for another round of discussions. Mediated by Oman, the talks were scheduled to resume March 2. By then, of course, the war was well underway.
According to Davenport, Wittkoff failed to grasp the details of the Iranian position, especially as it related to the Tehran Research Reactor, installed by the U.S. and activated in 1967 during the Cold War with the Soviet Union.
Designed in the balmy days of the Shah to produce medical isotopes, TRR originally ran on 90% (weapons grade) enriched uranium. The facility was subsequently converted by Argentina to run on 20%. Over the years, the Iranians had stockpiled 45.5 kg of uranium enriched to 20% for the fuel assemblies at TRR.
This was neither a surprising nor an alarming amount, Davenport wrote in her blog of March 11. Yet Wittkoff took it to mean that Iran was clandestinely on the road to deploying nuclear weapons.
If Iran wanted to use the 45.5 kg of uranium for weapons, Davenport says, it would have to “convert the material back to gas form,” not an especially easy task.
When International Atomic Energy Commission (IAEC) inspectors visited the TRR on Dec. 22, 2025, they found nothing amiss, according to Davenport.
After President Trump withdrew from the Obama administration’s nuclear agreement with Iran in 2018, the ruling clerics took steps to enable nuclear weapons’ research. However, Davenport imparts, “as the IAEC and U.S. intelligence community makes clear, there was no decision to develop nuclear weapons or testing for weaponization.”
“The Trump administration’s failure to exhaust diplomacy and to send an unqualified team to negotiate with Iran is inexcusable,” Davenport says. She warned that following this devastating war, “the Iranian government will retain” the knowledge it needs to build nuclear weapons, and “perhaps a greater political motivation to do so.”
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown. The author of “JFK Rising and Troubled Times,” he can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.