Does Trump realistically expect Iranian surrender in Oman to Vance and Witkoff?

Alastair Crooke, 17 June 2025

As Trump prevaricates and seems confused on what exactly he should do next, he ‘sends’ Vance and Witkoff to ‘negotiate with Iran’. Then in tandem, he posts on Truth Social, threatening that “everyone should immediately evacuate Tehran!” (Israeli style).

Plainly, his decision, for now, is to keep options open.

The situation in the broadest terms is that the attempt by Israel and allied Intelligence services to launch a surprise ‘synergistic psychic-shock’ to the Iranian state through simultaneous muti-domain decapitations, assassinations of scientists, disruption of Air Defence systems and the insertion of drone saboteur teams, failed.

It failed in its expected outcome -- that of paralysing and panicking the Iranian leadership and even creating the space for ‘the hoped for’ regime-change vibe to take hold. (It never happened. Iranians buried political differences and rallied to national sovereignty).

Rather, despite the loss of eight military line commanders, the system quickly re-booted itself: the Air Defence systems were restored within 8 hours, and Iran retaliated with missile attacks on Israel.

The point here was that – other than superficial surface damage – there was no setback made to Iran’s nuclear programme. And to be clear, that was never the Israeli aim. They simply do not have the ability to destroy infrastructure buried 800 metres into mountains. They (with their allies -- the US and European States) rather hope for ‘regime change’.