Second Third Fourth Fifth look at John Fetterman? The Senate Democrat from Pennsylvania sounds tougher on Iran than many of the Senate Republicans, and possibly tougher than Donald Trump himself. 

Today, the news about negotiations over the Iranian nuclear-weapons program sounds at least somewhat promising. We'll get to that shortly, but Fetterman ain't buying it, as he told Jon Levine at The Free Beacon in an exclusive interview. This is not the time for talk, but for action -- and he urged Trump to "waste that s***" first and talk later:

"Waste that s—t," the Pennsylvania Democrat told the Washington Free Beacon in an interview on Wednesday. "You're never going to be able to negotiate with that kind of regime that has been destabilizing the region for decades already, and now we have an incredible window, I believe, to do that, to strike and destroy Iran's nuclear facilities."

Fetterman dismissed the foreign policy experts who warn that striking Iran would lead to the outbreak of a regional war. "And remember, all of these so-called experts were all wrong," he said. "You know, they've been saying for years and years Hezbollah was the ultimate badass that kept Israel in check, and we can't move on anything beyond that."

As it turned out, Fetterman said, the Iranian proxy group "couldn't fight for s—t. And Hamas, literally, are just a bunch of tunnel rats with junkie rockets in the back of a Toyota truck. And now the Houthis have been effectively neutered as well. So what's left? You have Iran, and they have a nuclear facility, and it's clearly only for weapons."

Just how remarkable is this? Bear in mind that Fetterman's party still backs the deal Barack Obama cut with Iran, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) that basically unleashed all of the funding that went into the proxy wars Iran has conducted ever since. Joe Biden claimed to want to restore the JCPOA while running for his first term in office, and nearly did so. Democrats up and down the ranks all blame Trump for Iranian aggression and for Iran's progress on nuclear weapons since, even though Israel published clear evidence that Iran had never complied with the JCPOA -- ever. 

And now we have Fetterman -- already isolated from his party peers by his refusal to pander to Hamasniks -- staking out the Aliens position on Iran:

One has to wonder whether Fetterman will remain in the Democrat Party for too much longer. Fetterman is an old-school liberal, but has distanced himself from progressives at nearly every turn, and progressives are firmly in control of the Democrat Party. He can definitely look forward to a primary challenge in four years, especially if David Hogg is still carbuncled to the DNC. Fetterman may not be a great fit within the Senate GOP caucus, but that fit might be better than his current caucus choice. 

Ironically or not, the Trump administration seems to be making some progress on talks with Iran, at least incrementally. Today's news has those talks moving into the technical details of the nuclear-program restrictions, and the Iranians suggesting an interim agreement to lock in some goodwill for later discussions:

Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi told White House envoy Steve Witkoff during nuclear talks on Saturday that it might not be possible to reach a final nuclear accord on President Trump's proposed timetable and asked whether the sides should first negotiate an interim deal, two sources with knowledge of the issue tell Axios. ...

Araghchi told Witkoff that given the detailed technical nature of any nuclear agreement, it would be very difficult to complete the negotiations within 60 days.

• Witkoff told Araghchi he doesn't want to discuss an interim deal for the time being. Instead, he wants to focus on reaching a comprehensive deal within 60 days.
• If that both parties think significantly more time is needed as that deadline approaches, they can revisit the idea of an interim deal, Witkoff said according to the sources.

Also ironically or not, Trump likely would favor an interim deal -- as long as it surpassed the JCPOA in enforcement and transparency. He prefers deals to wars, even if he has no trouble "wast[ing] that s***" to make a point, such as the strike on Qassem Suleimani. Marco Rubio made that clear yesterday in an interview with the Free Press' Bari Weiss, a development closely watched by the Israeli media:

“We do not want to see war. This is not a president that campaigned on starting wars. And as he said very clearly, Iran is not going to have a nuclear weapon, and he reserves every right to prevent that from happening, but he would prefer it not happen. He would prefer that there not be a need to resort to military force, either by us or anybody else. He would prefer that it’d be something that we can negotiate.”

Rubio offered a vote of confidence in US special envoy Steve Witkoff, the leading American representative in the ongoing nuclear talks with Iran, saying “We have good people negotiating.”

“The Iranians have shown a willingness to talk. We’re going to talk to them,” stressed Rubio, adding that “if Iran wants a civil nuclear program, they can have one just like many other countries in the world have one. That is, they import enriched material.”

The fact that talks got this far is a testament to the existential crisis facing the mullahs regime in Tehran. All of their forward defenses have collapsed; Hezbollah has been neutered, Bashar al-Assad fled Syria, and the Houthis are on their way to the scrapyard. They are exposed to attack from all of their enemies, and they know it. The only way to keep their regime in power -- if it's at all possible in the long run anyway -- is to cut a deal with the US that de-escalates tensions with Israel. 

The problem for the US and Israel is this: Iran has made deals before, only to continue cheating. Fetterman's not wrong about the value of the mullahs' word in deals such as this. The only way to be sure, at least based on past experience, is to nuke those sites from space, or more realistically, bunker-buster them from the stratosphere until they can no longer be accessed. And unless the Iranians offer an agreement that provides such certainty, all of these talks may well be a pretext for a coordinated attack on those nuclear sites with the argument that at least Trump gave negotiations a chance to succeed first.