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** Iran Saw What Looked Like Weakness - Then Time Ran Out ([link removed])
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by Majid Rafizadeh • June 14, 2025 at 5:00 am
* These empty threats [to Hamas in January and Iran in March], more than anything, seem to have reinforced Iran's belief that it could stall, maneuver, and harden its position while the U.S. scrambled, desperate for a leverage it appeared to have dropped.
* The U.S. appeared afraid of escalation. The U.S. seemed to want a deal more than Iran did.
* Iran's negotiators dragged their feet, demanded more concessions, and eventually made it unmistakably clear that they would not halt uranium enrichment. Khamenei, in a rare address, explicitly stated that uranium enrichment was Iran's "sovereign right" and "not subject to foreign dictates."
* Instead of walking away, Trump did something that most likely stunned even Iran's most skeptical officials -- he reached out to Russia. He asked Russian President Vladimir Putin, Iran's closest global ally, to help mediate a deal. After drawing red lines and watching them crumble, after declaring enrichment a non-negotiable issue, the U.S. turned to Russia -- the same Russia that Iran is arming in the Ukraine conflict -- for help. For Iran, this was not just weakness. It was a full display of incompetence.
* In Tehran's calculus, this moment confirmed everything it had suspected: that the U.S. was willing to crawl, plead and negotiate on its knees to get Iran to... sign a piece of paper! They saw Trump's pivot to Putin as a validation of their strategy -- stall, resist, and wait for Washington to blink.
* Meanwhile, Israel had been sounding the alarm for years. Its intelligence services repeatedly uncovered secret Iranian sites, hidden stockpiles and covert operations.... Time had run out.
Pictured: Smoke rises from a location In Tehran, Iran that was targeted in Israel's wave of strikes, on the morning of June 13, 2025. (Photo by SAN/Middle East Images/AFP via Getty Images)
The Islamic Republic of Iran was no longer hiding its ambitions or disguising its defiance. It was openly confronting the United States, discarding every red line and ultimatum Washington drew in the sand.
At the center of the regime's defiance lay one uncompromising reality: Iran would not stop enriching uranium. U.S. President Donald J. Trump made it clear: if Iran wanted a deal, enrichment had to stop. Period. Iran repeatedly came back with "no." Iran's Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and his top nuclear negotiators declared again and again that enrichment was off the table. In fact, they escalated it. Iran's leaders mistook Trump's preference not to use crushing military force for a lack of resolve to stop them.
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