Way of the knife: Will Iran get third time lucky?

 At the core of the agreement that Trump now claims is possible is, in effect, the same that Al Busaidi was able to wrangle over the table

If young Joseph Heller had been in journalism school and asked to write an intro to President Donald Trump’s ultimatum to Iran and his seeming walk-back, he might have come up with something like this, darkly comic:

“The talks between the Americans and the Iranians began with the sort of hushed, urgent importance that usually precedes a complete disaster, so Trump naturally issued an ultimatum to blow the Iranian power grid into very tiny bits if they didn’t open the Hormuz immediately. And no sooner had he threatened to turn Iran into a dark, quiet shithole in the ground than he announced that the negotiations—the very same ones he had just ignored by issuing the threat—were going so splendidly that he was calling the whole thing off for five days.”

The Catch-22 here is that what we witness is not out of a DC comic book or a subsequent movie remake, say Tim Burton’s Batman, where Jack Napier’s (The Joker) character, played kitschy-compellingly by Jack Nicholson, tells the comely Kim Basinger, “You can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs.” Donald Trump issued the specific threat to “obliterate” Iran’s power grid on Sunday, March 22, 2026, at 5:14 AM IST. That sounds like a lot of eggs on the verge of metamorphoses to save Iran from Evil, darkness being a key component of comic-book villainy. Yet, based on Trump’s declaration on Monday that he was putting off the bombing because the talks were going swimmingly (given the Hormuz context), it is inferable that back-channel negotiations had already begun when he issued the omelette threat. 

Trump could very well be Milo Minderbender, the mess officer of the 256th squadron, an amoral, hyper-capitalist entrepreneur who bombs his own base at Pianosa for profit and makes good a contract with the Germans (read here the Israelis). There is a crucial difference. Milo did it for profit. Trump does because he can. For the fun of it. Reading Trump’s intention is a mug’s game. Look at his track record on Iran. The Omanis were stabbed in the back, not once but twice. The first time it happened was nine months ago. There were five rounds of talks, between April and May, in Muscat and Rome. Badr bin Hamad Al Busaidi, the Foreign Minister of Oman, played the intermediary.

Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, two characters who could well be out of a Battyman sequel, represented Trump; Ali Larijani and Aragchi spoke for the Evil Ones. On June 12, a sixty-day American deadline for Iran to comply ended, and Al Busaidi announced a sixth round scheduled for June 15 in Muscat. Which means the Americans were on board the Muscat meeting. On June 13 Israel, the main rooster in the West Asian hen house where Trump is the subsidiary rooster, launched a series of attacks targeting the Iranian leadership and its nuclear scientists. Iran retaliated, and on June 22, the US joined hammering Iran, prompting Al Busaidi to observe regretfully that a negotiated deal had appeared “really possible”. Meet Trump, the easily inveigled.

They met again, the same characters, on February 6, 17, and 26, the first time in Muscat and the second and third time in Geneva in the Omani envoy’s residence. Trump announced another deadline during the inaugural meeting of his Board of Peace in Washington on February 19. He warned that if a deal was not made, “bad things” would happen and stated, “You’ll be finding out over the next probably 10 days.”

In the third meeting the IAEA chief, Raphael Grossi, was present to provide illumination to the nuclear defanging of Iran. A technical meeting was discussed and scheduled for March 2, in Vienna, the headquarters of the IAEA. Iranians had agreed to downblending enriched uranium from 60% to 20% and to 24/7 monitoring by the IAEA. On March 27, Al Busaidi rushed to Washington to prevent a military attack, tweeting, “Peace is within reach.

” He amplified, “If the ultimate objective is to ensure forever that Iran cannot have a nuclear bomb, I think we have cracked that problem through these negotiations by agreeing [on] a very important breakthrough that has never been achieved any time before.” He added, “The single most important achievement, I believe, is the agreement that Iran will never ever have nuclear material that will create a bomb... Now we are talking about zero stockpiling, and that is very, very important because if you cannot stockpile material that is enriched, then there is no way that you can actually create a bomb.” It was in the bag, Iran’s nukes.

Lo and behold, on February 28, Trump bombed Iran because Israel was going to anyway. The logic was circular, very Catch-22. They had to bomb Iran before Israel bombed Iran, because once Israel bombed Iran, Iran would retaliate, which would prove Iran needed bombing—so the only way to avoid bombing Iran after Israel bombed Iran was to bomb Iran before Israel bombed Iran.

The Omanis had been betrayed again. In Geneva, Witkoff and Kushner, neither of them nuclear experts nor knowledgeable on Iran, met for the third time. It was a rushed day for the Battyman sequel characters. They met both the Iranians and the Russians the same day. The Iranians got three and a half hours in meetings they complained were rushed and the Americans ill-prepared. The Russians got more time. But that story is in abeyance for the moment. It will be funnier.

So on the 24th day of the bombing, Trump claimed that Iran had agreed to 15 points in back-door negotiations. This time with new middlemen, the Pakistanis—the Golem of South Asia. At the core of the agreement that Trump now claims is possible is, in effect, the same that Al Busaidi was able to wrangle over the table. How clever is that?

The new deadline expires Saturday. Will Iran get third time lucky with Trump? Your guess is better than mine. Overhead, meanwhile, the knife gleams meaningfully.

V SUDARSHAN