An Admission That Slipped From Trump’s Mouth About Iran and Revealed His Plan / We Frighten Iran So They Agree to a Deal

According to Rokna, Donald Trump on Friday, U.S. time, entered the military base of Fort Bragg in the state of North Carolina and, in keeping with his usual habit, began threatening Iran.

He once again spoke of dispatching a second aircraft carrier toward Iran and added: “I would like to see whether we can reach a deal or not.”

However, while addressing the military personnel present at the base, Trump inadvertently revealed the objective behind all these threats, stating that the aim is to frighten Iran into reaching an agreement [desired by the United States].

He said: “It is difficult to make a deal with them (Iran)… Sometimes you have to create fear; that is the only thing that can settle matters.”

The U.S. President also, in conversation with a reporter present at the base, resorted to his usual rambling remarks and spoke of his desire for “regime change in Iran”; Trump claimed: “Regime change in Iran would be the best possible thing.”

Trump also, while only hours earlier having said, “I think negotiations with Iran will succeed,” completely altered his statement and said that reaching an agreement with Iran is very difficult. Many experts describe these contradictions by Trump as a form of bluffing and psychological and media operations typical of gamblers.

The U.S. President further, in response to a reporter’s question about what he seeks from the Iranians in negotiations, replied: “They must now give us the same deal they should have given us from day one. If they propose a proper and real agreement to us, we will not attack. They talk a lot, but they take no action. It would be very good if we could resolve the Iran issue once and for all.”

Donald Trump’s acknowledgment that he seeks to “frighten” the Iranians in order to obtain his desired concessions at the negotiating table through military threats is an issue that had previously drawn the attention of some Western analysts.

Michael O'Hanlon, a defense and foreign policy analyst at the Brookings Institution, recently wrote in an article that the presence of the commander of CENTCOM in the U.S. negotiating team was “unusual” and that its sole purpose was to “frighten” the Iranian negotiating team.

The sum of these issues indicates that the U.S. administration has allocated a significant share to intimidation and frightening the Iranians in order to extract concessions, although, as written by the news outlet Bloomberg, “Donald Trump does not know the Iranians well.”

Bloomberg reported yesterday in an article regarding the extent of Donald Trump’s understanding of Iran: How much does Donald Trump know about Iran, a country he has threatened with military attack for the second time in less than a year? This question is not raised to mock the President, but rather because the lack of a basic understanding of the complex societies of the Middle East, at least since the fall of the Shah in 1979 and even before that, has consistently led American decision-makers into error.