President Trump, even as he renews a “maximum pressure” Iran policy, seems eager to negotiate a deal to end the mullahs’ dash to a nuclear weapon. 

While Israeli officials are being careful about criticizing a president who is showering gifts on Prime Minister Netanyahu, Israel has long opposed negotiations with the Islamic Republic. In the Mideast, “the only way you get peace and enduring peace is by being very, very strong,” the premier said while visiting the Pentagon Wednesday. 

Tehran’s aim, in contrast, is to “bully the West, specifically the United States, into negotiating a deal that would allow the Islamic Republic a path towards nuclear weapons,” a former spokesman for the Israel Defense Force, Jonathan Conricus, told the Sun earlier this week. 

At Tehran, there is a deep divide over the prospect of negotiations with Mr. Trump. The president is renewing his vow to deny the Islamic Republic’s ability to export oil, which is its main source of income. Washington officials also say they will push a “snap back” of a United Nations sanction regime that was phased out as part of the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran.  

While some Iranians are calling to push back, many are “eager to negotiate,” an Iran-born researcher at Tel Aviv University’s Institute for National Security Studies, Beni Sabti, tells the Sun. “Even the supreme leader said recently he has no objection to renewed negotiations.” 

An unidentified Iranian official is telling Reuters that while the Islamic Republic is willing to negotiate, Mr. Trump must first “rein in Israel if Washington is seeking a deal.” On Tuesday, the president announced he would give Israel 2,000-pound bombs that can penetrate Iran’s deeply dug nuclear facilities.  

The president, though, is making clear that the aim of his renewed pressure is to lure the Iranian leadership into negotiations. “Reports that the United States, working in conjunction with Israel, is going to blow Iran into ‘smithereens’ ARE GREATLY EXAGGARATED,” Mr. Trump wrote Wednesday on his X account.

“I would much prefer a Verified Nuclear Peace Agreement, which would let Iran peacefully grow and prosper,” he added. “We should start working on it immediately, and have a big Middle East Celebration when it is signed and completed.”

Mr. Trump’s 4 a.m. posting follows the signing Tuesday of an executive order to renew Iran sanctions and restrictions, specifically on oil exports. 

“It is the policy of the United States,” the White House announced Tuesday, “that Iran be denied a nuclear weapon and intercontinental ballistic missiles; that Iran’s network and campaign of regional aggression be neutralized; that the IRGC and its surrogates be disrupted, degraded, or denied access to the resources that sustain their destabilizing activities; and to counter Iran’s aggressive development of missiles and other asymmetric and conventional weapons capabilities.”

The Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps have threatened American officials, and sought revenge even on the president himself for the 2020 order that killed the Guards’ Qasem Soleimani. 

“I’ve left instructions,” Mr. Trump said Tuesday, when asked about Iranian threats on his life. “If they do it, they get obliterated, there would be nothing left” in Iran. 

Tehran quickly pushed back. “Iran considers it its right to pursue legal proceedings to ensure justice for the assassination of its national heroes,” the foreign ministry spokesman, Esmail Baghaei, said Wednesday. 

Despite such back and forth, Mr. Trump is signaling that befriending the regime might be the surest path to ending the nuclear threat. “I am signing this, but I’m unhappy to do it,” he told reporters Tuesday as he inked the “maximum pressure” renewal. America, he said, is “not going to allow them to have a nuclear weapon.” 

Mr. Netanayahu has made ending the Iranian threat his life mission. “I think the president just said something that I think is the pivot of everything that we’re talking about: He said Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon, and we fully agree with that,” the premier told the Jerusalem Post Wednesday. 

Although Mr. Netanayahu strongly opposed President Obama’s negotiations that led to the 2015 deal, he nevertheless declined to criticize Mr. Trump’s eagerness to negotiate. “If this goal can be achieved by a maximum pressure campaign, then it should be pursued,” he said. “But I think the most important thing is to focus on the goal, which the president just did, and I fully agree with it.”

Mr. Trump’s speculation that “there are many people at the top ranks of Iran that do not want to have a nuclear weapon” prompted the Quincy Institute’s Trita Parsi to praise the president. “I cannot recall any U.S. president ever deviating from the quasi-official American line that Tehran is dead set on getting nukes,” Mr. Parsi, who is an enthusiastic advocate of American appeasement of the mullahs, writes.