Administration Taps State Department’s Michael Anton as Technical Lead for Iran Talks

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.

Originally published in Jewish Insider.