On Monday’s broadcast of “CNN News Central,” Rep. Seth Moulton (D-MA) said that the U.S. has lost leverage in negotiations with Iran and there’s a lack of trust because “every time Iran has come to the negotiating table before, Trump has bombed them. The one time they signed an agreement with the United States, Trump ripped it up. So, he’s starting off in a terrible place to actually get a negotiated agreement.”
Moulton said that “we’re stalled in the negotiations, because [President Donald Trump’s] not really showing up with any trust or any leverage. There [are] two things you fundamentally need to do well in a negotiation: One is the basic trust that you can have a negotiation with the other side and that you can come to some agreement that both sides will, not only agree on, but will trust will be implemented. Well, every time Iran has come to the negotiating table before, Trump has bombed them. The one time they signed an agreement with the United States, Trump ripped it up. So, he’s starting off in a terrible place to actually get a negotiated agreement.”
He continued, “But then on top of that, he’s lost leverage, because Iran did not close the Strait of Hormuz, the Strait was open before this all started. They had not put our Gulf allies in a terrible position, destroying billions of dollars of their infrastructure. And so now Trump is really negotiating from behind with a team of completely amateur negotiators. But, at the end of the day, the problem is that there are only two ways that this ends: One is with a negotiated agreement, and the other is by literally taking over the entire country like we did in Iraq. Since nobody wants number two, we’ve got to find a way to [do] number one. But the President is negotiating from behind right now, and that’s why he’s lashing out in different directions, not really sure what to do next.”
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