The Deadly Delusion in the Iran Talks
President Donald Trump seems committed to negotiating a deal with Iran. A June 3 Wall Street Journal article claimed, “President Trump has told aides privately that he would consider ending the ceasefire with Iran if Tehran kills American troops,” but he says “the weekslong pause in air strikes remains intact despite a steady stream of violent skirmishes.” He consistently says he wants a deal where Iran never has a nuclear weapon, the Strait of Hormuz is open for world trade, and the wider war, including the war between Israel and Hezbollah, is over.
To President Trump’s credit, he has shown much more resolve in facing Iran with force than previous presidents, especially President Barack Obama. He has recognized Iran’s nuclear threat and has had the boldness to confront it.
But now, the war is at a stalemate. President Trump has found that America’s military cannot defeat Iran.
As I have said since the 1991 Gulf War, America has won its last war because it has failed to repent to God for its many sins. This is the same forecast Herbert W. Armstrong made for decades before the Philadelphia Trumpet existed.
At the start of the year, President Trump wanted to negotiate a settlement with Iran. Iran wouldn’t oblige, so he attacked. But it seems this was just a plan to convince Iran to make a deal. This is deeply concerning.
Do the president and his officials realize what they are up against?
Iran is not a normal power. The Iranian ideology is evil through and through. No other nation matches its fanatical thinking and extreme religious beliefs. These leaders believe they have a religious duty to bring about a nuclear cataclysm so their messiah can return! No matter what happens, these religious zealots believe they are the winners.
Making a nuclear deal with Iran is what President Obama did in 2016. He lifted oil and financial sanctions on Iran, flooding it with wealth that it sent to its terror proxies to attack Israel! This made America the number one state sponsor of the number one state sponsor of terrorism!
Meanwhile, Iran promised to stop enriching uranium beyond civilian levels. But it lied. It kept its enrichment system intact and kept importing uranium. Iran has a track record of lying over and over again about similar agreements.
As I write in my book America Under Attack, President Obama made this deal because he shared Iran’s goal of destroying America! President Trump doesn’t have that goal. He is entering negotiations in naivety and pride in his own ability rather than outright maliciousness. But if he doesn’t change course, the end result will be the same!
As America Under Attack explains, a prophecy in 2 Kings 14 shows that God sent Donald Trump to save America from Barack Obama’s attacks through the Iran deal and many other ways. Had God not intervened to save America “by the hand” of Donald Trump, then America’s republic would have been blotted out and Iran’s theocracy would probably have a nuclear weapon!
But now we see President Trump continuing Obama’s work! How could this possibly happen? Something is dreadfully wrong here.
The White House confirms it is in the final stages of a “memorandum of understanding” with Iran. This would reportedly extend the ceasefire by two months and open the Strait of Hormuz for shipping.
Leaks to the media say this deal would give Iran $24 billion in frozen assets—with half of it delivered immediately.
Park MacDougald wrote for Tablet: “Trump set out to effectively wipe Iran off the geopolitical map. Now, he’s haggling over bribes with a regime he’s claimed on dozens of occasions to have already annihilated. Even for Trump, who is above all a salesman, it’s hard to sell this as a victory.”
The memorandum also reportedly contains a commitment for Iran never to build a nuclear weapon. Iran has always claimed it never wants a nuclear weapon—even as it rushes toward building a nuclear weapon!
Iran cannot be trusted. It has broken its agreements with the United Nations over nuclear inspections countless times. The inspections never achieved anything. Iran just keeps deceiving the West, buying time to continue its nuclear activities—and the UN and the rest of the world play along.
Do you think Iran’s behavior will change because of another agreement?
Can anything good come out of these negotiations? The plain answer is no! Iran loves to negotiate with the West because it always wins! Iran only signals it is open to talks when it is confident it will win! And the West stupidly gives the Iranians what they want until everything is lost!
The Iranians are terrorists to the core! President Trump’s hope that these terrorists can be useful in a peaceful transition is delusional. He shouldn’t even be talking to them!
In our April 2025 Trumpet issue, I commented on some indications early in his term that President Trump would put dangerous trust in villains like Russian President Vladimir Putin and Hamas. I also commented on the idea of an Iranian nuclear deal. I wrote: “President Trump also says he wants to do a deal with Iran over its nuclear program. If he does, that will be yet another deal with the devil! Any deal will expand Iran’s ability to spread its evil terror across the Middle East. It threatens to unleash more ‘October 7’ massacres …” (“Does Donald Trump Know the Way to Peace?”).
British journalist Melanie Phillips went so far as to ask on June 5 if President Trump is becoming “a second Obama.” She wrote:
What started as the United States finally grasping that it had no option but to neutralize Iran, because it was getting perilously close to obtaining nuclear weapons to hit the “Great Satan,” now threatens to turn into a repeat of the 2015 nuclear deal debacle.
That was when Iran used bait-and-switch tactics until the Obama administration surrendered America’s security to fanatics who would eventually get the bomb.
President Trump is now at serious risk of turning into a second Obama. Not just Israel but also the entire free world should be alarmed.
President Trump says he is a man of peace. But he isn’t bringing peace to Israel. He could bring the opposite! In talking to Iran, he is dealing with the devil. When it comes to peace negotiations and international diplomacy, the president has a deadly weakness.
President Trump is right to worry about world peace. But negotiating with beastly powers like Iran is not the way to peace. Only God can save us from the storm that is building.
The reason America has been unable to defeat Iran, as Mr. Armstrong explained in The United States and Britain in Prophecy, is that our nation has forsaken God! Yet instead of recognizing and confessing the sins that led to those losses, we are withdrawing from the world and indulging in our sins all the more!
God has given America a brief window to repent of its sins, including in its foreign policy. But if America does not repent, we are heading toward bloody world war!
This is not my human prediction. It is God’s biblical warning!