Here's a lesson President Donald Trump should have learned a long time ago: Israel and its American lobby cannot be satisfied. No matter how much you give them, they always want more. Right now, they want Trump to restart the war with Iran, Israel's chief adversary in the Middle East.

Will Trump give them what they want? I fear he will.

In early February, weeks before Trump launched the war, I argued in The American Conservative that Iran was his "Israeli influence test." War with Iran would advance Israeli interests, not American ones, so it seemed a good test case for whether U.S. foreign policy served a foreign nation. I predicted Trump would fail the test, and I was right. So much for America First.

After the war went much worse than Trump expected, he wisely secured a two-week ceasefire in early April, and mere hours before the truce was set to end, he wisely extended it. The U.S. and Iran have used the opportunity to engage in diplomacy, mediated by Pakistan, but negotiations haven't seemed promising—until this week.

Axios reported Wednesday that the Trump administration "believes it's getting close to an agreement with Iran on a one-page memorandum of understanding to end the war and set a framework for more detailed nuclear negotiations." The reporter, Barak Ravid, has been derided as a White House stenographer who publishes stories that seem designed to calm the markets rather than uncover the truth. But this time, other journalists have corroborated Ravid's reporting.

Here's an important development and cause for hope: Iran seems willing to accept a moratorium on uranium enrichment, a key stage in the process of making nuclear fuel. "I do think there are signs that parts of the Iranian establishment are more open to creative arrangements around enrichment levels or temporary limits, especially given the economic pressure Iran has been under," Sina Toossi, an Iran expert at the Center for International Policy, told The American Conservative.

Elements of the Islamic Republic have at times denied that Iran was mulling a moratorium. But the journalist Ryan Grim of Drop Site News, which has sources in the Iranian government, told TAC that Tehran seems willing to pause enrichment in exchange for U.S. concessions like sanctions relief. "They have said as much," Grim insisted.

That would be a big concession on a major sticking point. If the Islamic Republic agreed to a yearslong moratorium, followed by caps on enrichment far below the amount needed to build nuclear weapons, then Trump could claim to have struck a deal with Tehran better than Barack Obama's Iran nuclear accord, which he exited in 2018.