Iran is obsessed with destroying the USA (AKA “the great Satan”) and Israel (AKA “the little Satan”). This well-known fact places President Donald Trump on the knife-edge of triumph versus disaster, for Trump wants a deal, an agreement, but Iran wants fire and brimstone raining down on the USA and Israel. It does not regard any agreement as restricting Iran’s options.

As Marjan Keypour Greenblatt observes,

The concepts of taqiyyah and “khod’eh“ (strategic deceit) are deeply embedded in the regime’s political playbook. These tools allow the regime to maintain flexibility in negotiations and justify sudden policy shifts with religious cover.

Iran has no intention of candidly disclosing all its nuclear sites. In 2002, Iran was discovered to have secret nuclear facilities that violated the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

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And on May 11, Breitbart reported that, on May 8, the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) revealed in a press conference the existence of a clandestine Iranian nuclear weapons facility—known internally as the “Rainbow Site”—that “allegedly aimed at manufacturing enhanced nuclear warheads and hydrogen bombs.”

In that paragraph, the single most important word is “clandestine.” This is the Iran that Trump is trying to make a deal with: The Iran that will not willingly forgo development of nuclear weapons and that intends to use them when it gets them (whether developed or bought), but that will happily accept cash or trade benefits in exchange for a mere promise to forgo development, a promise that it has no intention to honor.

What to do? Is there a solution? Yes, there are two solutions, one wholesale and one retail.

In this environment of animosity and intended deceit, military occupation is the only sure way to proceed. That, though, will require war.

However, there is another method just short of war but almost as certain of success: military surveillance as a condition of a treaty. This means hands-on, 24/7, on-site surveillance by the US military of every suspect cubic inch of Iran. Such military surveillance would be Trump’s implementation of Reagan’s “Trust but verify” and could probably be done well enough to prevent Iran from developing nuclear warheads and the missiles to deliver them.