The Negotiators Who Did Not Want a Deal
Novara Media's Aaron Bastani and Kieran Andrea use this episode of Novara Live to trace a thread that runs through the Iran war, the UK economy, Cuba's blackout, and the broader trajectory of American empire. The broadcast is loosely structured and conversational, but its central argument is sharp: the Trump administration's pivot from economic nationalism to foreign intervention represents a capitulation to the very neoconservative forces that Trump's original movement defined itself against.
The most consequential reporting in the episode concerns the sidelining of Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner from Iran negotiations. According to the Guardian, Iran told Pakistani mediators it would refuse to negotiate with either figure, regarding them as having acted in bad faith before the war. JD Vance has reportedly been floated as an alternative. But the real story is not who replaces them -- it is the accumulating evidence that Witkoff and Kushner actively torpedoed talks that were, by multiple independent accounts, on the verge of producing historic concessions.
A Deal That Was There for the Taking
Bastani builds a damning case by layering testimony from several sources who had direct involvement in or knowledge of the pre-war negotiations. The Omani foreign minister, whose country brokered the talks, went on American television before the bombing began to argue that Iran had offered something unprecedented.
The single most important achievement I believe is the agreement that Iran will never ever have a nuclear material that will create a bomb. This is something that is not in the old deal that was negotiated during President Obama's time. This is something completely new.
The Omanis were not the only ones who felt the talks were genuine. Jonathan Powell, Tony Blair's former chief of staff from 1997 to 2007 and no foreign policy dove, reviewed private memos from the negotiations and concluded that Iran was being far more willing to compromise than he had expected. Those memos were not intended for public consumption, which makes them harder to dismiss as performative.
Against this backdrop, a Gulf diplomat with direct knowledge of the talks offered perhaps the most incendiary assessment of the two American negotiators.
Israeli assets conspired to force the US president into entering a war from which he is now desperate to get himself out of.
Bastani is careful to note the source: not an Iranian official, not a social media commentator, but a Gulf diplomat from a country with material interests in regional stability. Andrea goes further, stating bluntly that as long as Witkoff and Kushner operate through the prism of Israeli interests equal to or above American interests, calling them Israeli government assets is "a truism."
Vance as the MAGA Correction
The introduction of JD Vance into the negotiations is framed by both hosts not as a simple personnel change but as evidence that the fracture within the MAGA movement -- previously confined to commentators like Tucker Carlson -- has now reached the administration itself. Andrea argues that this split was always inevitable and that Israel would be the issue to cause it.
Israel always wants to get you into foreign wars. So the money thing, the war thing, it was inevitable that Israel was going to be the cause of this rupture.
Vance's own record provides some basis for cautious optimism. In October 2024, he stated plainly that going to war with Iran would be a "huge distraction of resources" and "massively expensive." When confronted with those words in a recent Oval Office press conference, his response was notably tepid -- "pray for success" and "make it as successful as possible" -- which Bastani reads as something far short of a ringing endorsement of the bombing campaign.
Yet a counterpoint is warranted. Vance remains staunchly pro-Israel. During the Gaza conflict, he criticized the Biden administration for allegedly micromanaging Israeli operations, implying he wanted fewer restrictions on their military conduct. A diplomat who supports greater Israeli military latitude in one theatre is an uncertain candidate to restrain Israeli influence in another. The optimism surrounding his appointment may say more about how badly the Witkoff-Kushner channel failed than about Vance's own diplomatic instincts.
The Administration That Thinks Iran Is Venezuela
One of the broadcast's most telling passages concerns the Trump administration's apparent belief that it can manage regime change in Iran the same way it attempted to in Venezuela. Politico reported that officials were eyeing Iranian parliamentary speaker Muhammad Baqer Qalibaf as a potential US-backed leader. A senior administration official described the approach in language that reveals a startling lack of understanding of Iranian politics.
We're in the testing phase of really trying to figure out who can rise and who wants to rise. And then as people rise, we'll do a quick test and if they're radical, we'll take them out.
Bastani's response is withering: anyone who attempts a puppet-leader arrangement in Iran will be "assassinated by the Revolutionary Guard before you can finish your breakfast." He cites Vali Nasr, the Johns Hopkins academic, who points out that Israel's decapitation strategy has not weakened Iranian hardliners but has transferred power to the most hawkish wing of the IRGC. The appointment of former IRGC General Zolqadr -- described as so extreme that Qasem Soleimani once left the IRGC because of him -- suggests Iran's posture will become more aggressive, not more compliant.
Andrea frames this miscalculation as structural rather than incidental. The American foreign policy establishment, he argues, treats countries like Iran as "black boxes" -- opaque systems where internal dynamics are irrelevant and only outputs matter. Unlike the British and French empires, which at least had to administer their colonial territories and therefore developed some pragmatic understanding of local conditions, the United States can afford to be reckless because two oceans insulate it from the consequences of its own decisions.
The Europeans will get the energy inflation. The Asians will get the de-industrialization. And the Russians and Europeans will get the displaced people and the refugees, and America gets none of it.
The Domestic Agenda That Disappeared
The broadcast's second major thread concerns the Trump administration's abandonment of its domestic economic promises. Bastani cites Brookings Institution projections showing US debt rising from 99% of GDP in 2025 to 120% by 2036, potentially reaching 175% by the 2060s. If Trump's temporary tax provisions become permanent, debt could exceed 211% of GDP. This from a president who ran on fiscal discipline and whose DOGE initiative was supposed to shrink the state.
The jobs picture compounds the problem. The US lost 92,000 jobs in February. Gallup data shows that for the first time since tracking began, more American workers report struggling in their lives than thriving -- 49% to 46%. Worker engagement has dropped to a decade low of 31%.
Perhaps most damning is Bastani's observation about the fiscal multiplier: between 2020 and 2024, the US economy grew by $6 trillion while debt increased by $12 trillion. Every dollar of new debt produced only fifty cents of GDP growth, compared to the roughly ten-to-one ratio of the immediate postwar period. American economic growth, in other words, is increasingly a debt-fueled illusion.
A Ted Cruz interview on the Trigonometry channel serves as Bastani's exhibit for where Republican attention has actually gone. Cruz speaks excitedly about the possibility of new governments in Iran, Venezuela, and Cuba, calling it potentially "the biggest geopolitical shift since the fall of the Berlin Wall." Bastani's retort is that this enthusiasm for reshaping governments thousands of miles away coexists with 40 million Americans who needed food stamps, maternal mortality rates worse than Bosnia's, and Chinese adolescent girls who are now taller than their American counterparts due to better nutrition.
Britain Braces for the Trumpsession
The UK economic segment features Chancellor Rachel Reeves announcing that unlike during the Ukraine energy crisis, there will be no universal support for energy bills. Morgan Stanley warns that Britain faces a "pronounced recession" by the end of 2026 if energy prices remain elevated. Interest rates above 5% on three trillion pounds of national debt would consume roughly 150 billion pounds annually in interest payments alone -- comparable to the entire NHS budget when combined with state pension obligations.
Angus Hansen, author of "Vassal State: How America Runs Britain," argues that the UK's alignment with Washington looks increasingly irrational as the world moves toward multipolarity. His prescription -- closer alignment with Europe, independence from Washington on the French model -- is not radical, but it remains politically difficult for a Labour government terrified of being seen to advocate EU re-entry.
Bottom Line
The broadcast's most significant contribution is its assembly of multiple independent sources -- Omani diplomats, Gulf officials, Jonathan Powell's private memos, Politico's White House reporting -- into a coherent narrative about how the Iran war began. The picture that emerges is not of a president who chose war after exhausting diplomacy, but of negotiators who ensured diplomacy would fail. Whether the introduction of JD Vance represents a genuine course correction or merely a change of face on the same policy remains to be seen. But the economic data Bastani presents -- spiraling debt, negative job growth, collapsing worker morale -- suggests that the domestic costs of foreign adventurism are accumulating faster than the administration can ignore them. The Trump project promised to put America first. By every metric its hosts examine, it has done the opposite.