The Trump Administration is the most transparent in the history of the country, but keeping up with the torturous talks with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) is getting harder all the time.
It started off clearly enough, but since this Iran campaign went into negotiation mode with the leftover leaders of the IRGC, it's been as if we're "looking through a glass, darkly," as Paul put it in 1 Corinthians.
From claims of kamikazi dolphins, to on-and-off-again negotiations, claims of full air superiority, use of autonomous ships, to the question of whether we can call it a "war," there's been confusion about what is going on in the Iran conflict and the subsequent talks. Some of this confusion is on purpose, no doubt, to confound the IRGC leftovers, but people like me who try to keep up are, well, frustrated.
The Iranian leftover leaders are conducting what is obviously a stall strategy, of course, and President Trump posted on Truth Social over the weekend that he knows what they're doing, "DELAY, DELAY, DELAY!" he wrote.
I asked a subject matter expert, Edmund Fitton-Brown — a former UK ambassador to Yemen and former UN negotiator with Al Qaeda and the Taliban — to explain if those talks can get us to something we can call "victory."
The Iran conflict is something I tackle on Tuesdays in my Adult in the Room Podcast livestream, and I asked the senior fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies to explain things to me.
In the interview, Fitton-Brown explained that "[Trump] is really serious about peace, but you don't get peace with people who want to kill you." However, there are three tiers of achievable "peace," and they are "minimum victory, medium victory, and ... maximum victory." You can see the entire exchange at 22:20 of this video below, but here's a distilled version of his theory.
"Minimum is the straightforward moves, open [Hormuz], no Iranian toll, complete reassertion of... the law of the sea and freedom of navigation," he told me.
"[W]e need the Iranians to acknowledge that they can't enrich uranium in the future," he said. "Those are the minimum conditions."
The Hormuz takeover, though not completely unexpected, gave the Iranians another leverage point they didn't have before.
Fitton-Brown said he'd negotiate for more, of course.
"Medium conditions for success would be to get the Iranians to agree that they will not resume their procurement and manufacture of ballistic missiles so that so that we don't have this constant threat to Israel that has destabilized the Middle East," and that sounds even better.
He continued, "Iranians would acknowledge that they have to reign in their proxies. They can't just keep waging war on their neighbors using the Houthis, the Hezballah, Iraqi militias and Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad."
Minimum plus Medium equals a better deal.
Here's what he says maximum victory for the U.S. would look like, in addition to the other tiers of victory.
"Regime change ... empowering the Iranian people and giving us an Iran that could be a friend in the future," he told me. He says they've been anything but that in the past 47 years.
"We have allowed the Iranians for 47 years to chant death to America. And that should never have been allowed. Right from the start, we should have said to them, you know, if you say that, then you cannot be allowed to have a kind of civilized relationship with us," he stated. He'd keep sanctions going until "they realized there was a real cost to [saying] it."
The IRGC gets a vote, too. Now the Iranian nuke czar says Trump's number one goal, the Islamist's nuclear program, will not be part of any negotiations.
Mohammad Eslami, head of Iran's Atomic Energy Organization, told a parliamentary security committee session that nuclear technology will not be part of any negotiations and that enrichment is off the table entirely. Reported by committee spokesman Ebrahim Rezaei. pic.twitter.com/bEAVOmNTBD
— Open Source Intel (@Osint613) May 11, 2026
Fitton-Brown says, "The lesson is to take people at their word."
Maybe it's time to bring back the B-2s.
Watch my interview below.
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