Trump’s ‘new, reasonable’ Iran is neither new nor reasonable, and he knows it

https://www.timesofisrael.com/trumps-new-reasonable-iran-is-neither-new-nor-reasonable-and-he-knows-it/

 There is a blatant contradiction between US President Donald Trump’s repeated insistence, on the one hand, that the war against Iran has achieved “regime change” and he is now negotiating with new, “much more reasonable leaders,” and his simultaneous acknowledgement, on the other, that any Iranian who dares to take to the streets faces an immediate death sentence.

The same goes for his simultaneous contention, also expounded at Monday’s press conference, that the purportedly new regime is “not as radicalized” as its predecessor, but that, nonetheless, “Israel will be gone, the Middle East will be gone,” if Iran gets the bomb.

“We won, okay,” the US president claimed on Monday night. But for all his contradictions, as Trump knows full well, the Iranian regime against which he went to war remains in power, and its nuclear ambitions are anything but dimmed.