Iran's Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei is holed up at a secret location, communicating through a network of couriers like some medieval king on the run, while President Trump calmly announces that a final decision on a nuclear deal could come "within days." According to Newsmax, citing CBS News sources, the most powerful man in Iran is so rattled that U.S. officials are describing the situation as comedy television.
Remember when Obama sent pallets of cash in the middle of the night? Yeah, this is the exact opposite of that.
U.S. officials told CBS News they're watching the Iranian leadership try to function with their supreme leader in hiding, and the description is priceless: "Watching them try to figure out how to talk to each other is almost like watching a sitcom. They are completely exasperated." That's not a quote from a late-night comedian. That's an actual U.S. official describing the state of Iran's government right now.
The dysfunction goes deeper. According to the same officials, "Every piece of information he receives is dated and there's a lot of latency to his responses." Translation: Khamenei is so isolated that by the time he gets intelligence briefings, they're already old news. He's making decisions about nuclear negotiations with yesterday's information delivered by guys on motorcycles.
Khamenei was reportedly injured during Operation Epic Fury — the military strikes that preceded these negotiations — and has been communicating only "broad negotiating parameters" through trusted couriers to minimize detection. Let that sink in. The leader of a nation that has spent decades chanting "Death to America" is now hiding from America and hoping his courier network doesn't get intercepted.
This is what happens when you negotiate from strength instead of weakness. Under Obama's JCPOA, we got a deal so bad that Iran was practically enriching uranium with American taxpayer money as a thank-you gift. Under Trump, the Ayatollah is cowering in an undisclosed location while his entire government apparatus struggles to even communicate with itself.
U.S. and Israeli intelligence apparently have enough visibility into this situation to know exactly how disorganized Iran's command structure has become. That's not just military superiority. That's intelligence dominance. The kind you get when your president actually lets the military and intelligence community do their jobs instead of apologizing to mullahs.
Trump declared that any deal will be "good and proper" and the "exact opposite" of Obama's JCPOA. Given that Obama's version involved flying $400 million in cash on an unmarked cargo plane to Tehran, the bar isn't exactly high. But the fact that we're negotiating with a regime whose leader literally can't show his face in public tells you everything about who has leverage here.
Somewhere, John Kerry is nervously adjusting his tie and wondering why nobody ever hid in a bunker when he was negotiating.