A former foreign policy official under presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden was surprised by Donald Trump's social media post upending his administration's narrative on Iran.
Israel launched an unprecedented strike on Iran's nuclear program and military leaders, killing Revolutionary Guard commander Hossein Salami and major general Mohammad Bagheri, and Trump acknowledged Friday morning that he had signed off on the attack.
"Wow," said former Obama and Biden official Joel Rubin, as "CNN This Morning" host Audie Cornish read the Truth Social post.
"I hate to put you in the hot seat, but, yeah, follow up on that, wow," Cornish added.
Rubin could only imagine that Trump believed the negotiations had stalled with Iran on a nuclear deal.
"What the president is basically saying is that he didn't buy what Iran was offering at the table, and what he's saying is that when he called for a deal that had zero enrichment, he felt like Iran's response was stringing them along, stringing us along," Rubin said, and there is some validity to that. You know, Audie, the International Atomic Energy Agency, the nuclear watchdog of the whole global nuclear infrastructure around the world, they they provided a censure resolution against Iran just yesterday."
Rubin believes the talks have probably broken down because all sides have lost trust in one another.
"I think a big question is whether the talks are a ruse, quite frankly," he said. "Look, you know, when the president says what he said just now and you combine that with the response from Israel and the response from the IAEA, one can only assume that the goals that the talks were so hard for Iran to meet that really the United States was just sitting there and legging out these discussions."
"There was not a deep, I have to say this, you know, from looking back at Iran nuclear diplomacy for well over a decade, there was not a deep, detailed negotiation underway from the United States team, unlike in the Obama administration," he added. "We had a 300-page nuclear deal with Iran that was very annotated and very specific, and so I really am questioning whether or not there was really going to be detailed negotiations. It was either Iran, get rid of your nuclear infrastructure, or we're going to let the Israelis bomb."
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