The Trump administration tapped Michael Anton, the State Department’s director of policy planning, to lead a team of technical experts in negotiations with the Iranian regime about its nuclear program. 

According to Politico, Anton will lead a team of around 12 mostly career officials in discussions set to begin this weekend.

Anton is a conservative essayist and speechwriter who served in the first Trump administration as a deputy assistant to the president for strategic communications on the National Security Council. He was subsequently a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute.

In a 2020 Fox News interview, Anton said that the original Iran deal was flawed in part because it provided significant up-front financial benefits to Iran before the provisions more favorable to the U.S. took effect, which Iran used to fuel terrorism. He said Trump was “right to object to that” and reimpose sanctions. He said that cutting off Iranian resources would de-escalate, rather than escalate conflict.

He also supported the U.S. strike that killed Gen. Qassem Soleimani. 

Anton said on Fox and in a 2019 interview with NPR that he views Iran as generally cautious, retreating if it faces strong resistance.

“When and where Iran sees either weakness and/or a lack of vigilance — America not paying attention — it tends to try to exploit what it sees as gaps,” Anton said. “When it sees that we are being strong, that we are being vigilant, that we’re not leaving them opportunities to harm our interests, it tends to back down and turn its attentions elsewhere.”

He said that the U.S. and its allies can deter Iranian aggression by presenting a strong and united front. He also emphasized that all administration officials should ultimately defer to the president’s judgement on any issues to do with Iran or be fired.

Anton is known as an ardent defender of Trump and his foreign policy approach, which he described in a past interview with Jewish Insider as aiming to roll back U.S. involvement throughout the world and focusing instead on defending U.S. national security, economic interests, competitiveness and alliance structure.

“It’s a more focused doctrine than what Trumpism replaced. It’s seeing American interest through a more narrow lens,” Anton said. “Once you define everything as a priority, nothing is a priority. Once you define everything as an interest, it means nothing is an interest.”

He also told JI that he sees the U.S.-Israel relationship as critical to the U.S.’ security strategy but also based on more than “dollars and cents,” including a “shared conviction and shared interests” and a “natural affinity to democracies that share common values and so on.”

Michael Makovsky, the CEO of the Jewish Institute for National Security of America, who has expressed some concerns about the direction of the nuclear talks, said that the actual technical details of the talks are the paramount question.

“It depends upon what the technical team intends to do. If it’s to work out the technical details of dismantlement of Iran’s nuclear program, including its enrichment facilities, as well as limits on its missile program, that would be most welcome,” Makovsky said. “However, if it’s to work out the technical minutiae of a new version of Obama’s JCPOA, then that would be dangerous. The administration should clear up the confusion and clarify to the American people what its policy is.”

Daneille Pletka, a distinguished fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, told JI that Anton is a “weird choice” because “this is not his bailiwick. And there are others inside the administration who know more about Iran.”

“Donald Trump has had some success historically thinking outside the box about long-term challenges,” Pletka said. “But the technical issues are actually pretty challenging. Anton is no dummy, and so I suspect he can get up to speed. But I really worry about [Middle East Envoy Steve] Witkoff, and about the fact that there is no Venn diagram in which our red lines and the Iranian red lines intersect. So what are we negotiating about?”

Witkoff, the lead U.S. negotiator, has raised concerns among Iran hawks with inconsistent public explanations of the U.S.’ negotiating position on the issue of whether Iran can maintain domestic nuclear enrichment.

Dan Shapiro, a senior official in the Pentagon under the Biden administration and an ambassador to Israel under the Obama administration who is now a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, said that he does not know Anton personally but “as a policy lead, it makes sense if he has the confidence of” Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

“But even more important is to staff the delegation for technical talks with bona fide nuclear technology experts,” Shapiro continued. “The Iranians know their brief cold. The U.S. team has to be able to match their expertise and call BS on loopholes that would sustain a pathway to a nuclear weapon.”

The news of Anton’s selection comes amid reports in Israeli media that Israeli officials are concerned the U.S. is approaching an insufficient deal that will not prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons, that the talks are already far along and that Israel is not being kept informed on critical issues.

Michael Anton, a former senior National Security Council official in the Trump administration, is “amazed” by what the administration has achieved in the president’s first term — but warns in a new book that the U.S. could careen into disaster if Donald Trump loses his reelection bid in November.

In his new book, The Stakes: America at the Point of No Return, which hit bookshelves last week, Anton argues that this situation has not fundamentally changed — America remains on the brink, and a Trump reelection is the only way to preserve the American way of life.

Although Anton served as the spokesman for Trump’s National Security Council, and left the administration just before former National Security Advisor John Bolton took office, foreign policy is not Anton’s top focus in the book.

However, he writes that the current international world order, with America at its helm, is “a voluntary alliance of neoliberal elites across nations to work together in their own interests.”

According to Anton, Trump’s foreign policy doctrine seeks to fight back against the current structure by rolling back decades of steadily expanding American foreign policy, which dictated that America needed to maintain a presence in every corner of the world.

Trump’s foreign policy has a more narrow focus, centered on defending national security, maintaining America’s economic and trading competitiveness, and maintaining America’s alliance structure, Anton continued.

“It’s a more focused doctrine than what Trumpism replaced. It’s seeing American interest through a more narrow lens,” he told Jewish Insider. “Once you define everything as a priority, nothing is a priority. Once you define everything as an interest, it means nothing is an interest.”

Anton explained that the Trump administration’s approach to the U.S.-Israel relationship fits within such a mold in part because of Israel’s critical position in the U.S.’s security strategy.

“But so many foreign relationships can’t be reduced to dollars and cents,” he added. “America has allies out of shared conviction and shared interests… Some of these alliances that you have are simply because of a natural affinity to democracies that share common values, and so on and so forth, and relationships built up over decades. And you don’t necessarily ask the question, ‘Hey, what am I getting out of this today?’ It’s not a calculation at every step of the way in foreign policy.”

Anton characterized the recent normalization of relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates as one of a litany of major Trump administration foreign policy accomplishments.

He declined to say whether this move was in the works during his tenure in the White House, but indicated that it fits within the Trump administration’s broader Middle East strategy.

“We knew going in that a big part of Middle East diplomacy would have to be as much normalization as possible between Israel and other states,” Anton said. “We knew also that some of that normalization would take place below the radar. It wouldn’t be formal or it would take a while for it to become formal. But we certainly were seeking to achieve as much formal normalization as possible.”

Anton also boasted that the Trump administration had helped improve the Israeli-Saudi relationship.

“The fact that relations get better and a lot of quiet and not particularly visible cooperation takes place is also an accomplishment, even if you don’t see it and even if there’s no moment where people sit down and shake hands and sign something,” he said, adding that the Trump administration sees improving relationships between Israel and Arab states as a critical step in facilitating an Israeli-Palestinian peace process. 

Anton acknowledged that the Trump administration’s peace proposal is not, and cannot be, a final peace deal, but laid blame on the Palestinians for the lack of progress — criticizing Palestinian leaders for walking away from the negotiating table after the U.S. moved its embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

“What I had hoped for at the time was that it was a demonstration of displeasure… that would last a finite amount of time… and then the Palestinians would come back knowing that that recognition really didn’t change anything,” he said. “I don’t think that they’re helping themselves by staying away and not talking. I don’t see what that gains them.” 

Anton said he does not believe there is anything specific the U.S. can do to incentivize the Palestinians to return to the table, but it can push Arab states to encourage the Palestinians to reengage in negotiations.

In a second term, Anton predicted that Trump would continue to work toward a Middle East peace deal — although he acknowledged that is contingent on the Palestinians returning to the negotiating table. Anton also suggested that the administration would continue to pursue talks with North Korea and focus on the U.S.-China relationship.

Anton’s broader argument in The Stakes — that America is on the brink — echoes his 2016 essay, “The Flight 93 Election,” which made waves in political and media spheres. In it, he argued that a Hillary Clinton victory would, essentially, mark the end of America as it has existed, and that a Trump victory was the only possibility to stave off a calamity.

Anton said that, despite four years of a Trump presidency, the U.S. remains in a precipitous situation because of the influence of the federal bureaucracy and other institutional powers like the media, academia and the corporate world. “Every other power center in the country is held by people who oppose the president’s agenda,” he said

And America will find itself on the brink of disaster every four years, Anton continued, “until and unless we can get back to something like a real politics of give and take in this country.”