WASHINGTON — Even as President Donald Trump held his second meeting with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un in Hanoi to try to advance a North Korea nuclear deal, the Trump administration mocked as basically irrelevant Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif’s surprise resignation and return to the job this week, in a sign of how remote the prospects seem for the United States ever getting to the negotiating table with Iran.
Some administration officials have recently privately expressed misgivings about how far the policy has strayed from Trump’s stated goal last year — to try to negotiate a broader deal with Iran that would address other concerns not solved in the 2015 Iran nuclear deal that Trump withdrew from last year — to one that increasingly seems regime change in all but name.
