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| A search and rescue team member sits in the rubble of a damaged building in Tehran on 12 March. Photograph: Anadolu/Getty Images |
How ignorance, misunderstanding and obfuscation ended Iran nuclear talks
Negotiators had reached agreement on key issues despite Trump team’s idiosyncratic approach. Two days later, war began
In the many bizarre exchanges that occurred in the run-up to the US-Israeli attack on Iran, perhaps the most unexpected was an invitation by Donald Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff for the Iranian foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, to join him and Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, for a visit to the USS Abraham Lincoln carrier strike group.
The idea that Araghchi would leave talks in Oman about the future of Iran’s nuclear programme to tour a ship sent to the Gulf in an effort to dislodge his government seemed idiosyncratic at best.
But it was symptomatic of the unorthodox way in which Kushner and Witkoff approached the nuclear talks that stretched through last year and this, and have twice been halted by Israeli and US airstrikes.
One Gulf diplomat, who has direct knowledge of the talks and is furious with Witkoff and Kushner’s behaviour, described the pair as “Israeli assets that had conspired to force the US president into entering a war from which he is now desperate to get himself out of”.
Witkoff does not pretend to regional expertise – in one of his recent interviews he referred to the strait of Hormuz as the “Gulf of Hormuz”. Similarly, he admitted in an interview that his knowledge of Iran’s nuclear programme was sketchy.... READ MORE https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/mar/18/ignorance-misunderstanding-obfuscation-iran-nuclear-talks-trump