A bold idea quietly surfaced last month in U.S.-Iranian negotiations: What if the United States didn’t just try to contain Iran’s nuclear program—but helped build it?
The idea is aimed squarely at U.S. President Donald Trump’s dealmaking instincts—on full display during a trip to the Middle East last week. Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi wrote in a Washington Post op-ed in April that a new nuclear deal could pave the way for U.S. companies to access what he claimed was a “trillion-dollar” economic opportunity in a country with some of the largest oil and gas reserves in the world.
Separately, Araghchi released the text of a speech he had prepared to deliver at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (the event was canceled), outlining Iran’s plans to construct at least 19 new nuclear reactors and floating the idea of U.S. investment. He said Iran’s domestic market could help “revitalize the struggling nuclear industry in the United States.”
This was no diplomatic olive branch. It was a calculated appeal to Trump’s preferred style of diplomacy—transactional, high-stakes, and headline-worthy. The pitch offered Washington jobs and strict verification mechanisms in exchange for sanctions relief and technology access for Tehran. It was Iran’s way of trying to turn a decades-long standoff into a mutual business opportunity.
Araghchi’s underlying message to Trump was strategic: reframe the nuclear program not as a security threat but as an economic asset. Trump responds to big numbers and bigger deals. If he is promised U.S. jobs and a legacy-defining agreement, the thinking goes, he’ll follow through.
The proposal was not entirely new. Similar discussions were held between the two countries during the negotiations for the 2015 nuclear deal, also known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), which Trump jettisoned in 2018.
By once again dangling the prospect of economic opportunity tied to investment in its nuclear industry, Tehran is testing the elasticity of U.S. political risk tolerance—at a moment when Trump is rewriting the rules of diplomacy. Iran hopes that Trump, unlike past presidents, may view the nuclear talks through the lens of transactional gain.
From a historical perspective, the idea isn’t so far-fetched. Iran’s nuclear industry was born with U.S. support. In 1957, under President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s “Atoms for Peace” program—a Cold War initiative aimed at promoting peaceful nuclear technology in allied states—the United States helped Tehran launch its first nuclear program. A decade later, Washington built a 5-megawatt research reactor on the campus of Tehran University, which is still in operation today. It even supplied Iran with weapons-grade enriched uranium to fuel it.
Buoyed by the oil boom of the 1970s, Iran rapidly expanded its nuclear efforts into a full-scale civilian program. Many of the scientists leading it today received their training at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and other top U.S. universities.
These days, Iran’s renewed push for Western economic cooperation is driven in part by growing frustration with the limited gains from its “pivot to the East.” Tehran had long hoped that deeper ties with China and Russia would blunt the impact of U.S. sanctions and anchor a self-reliant “resistance economy.” That vision did not materialize as hoped. U.S. sanctions continue to choke trade, deter investment, and paralyze joint ventures.
Russia has been Iran’s most consistent nuclear partner to date. Its state-owned energy firm Rosatom supplies fuel and technical support to the Bushehr nuclear power plant and is currently helping to construct two additional units there with oversight from the International Atomic Energy Agency.
But Rosatom’s ties with Iran are also constrained by Russia’s risk calculus. Deeper engagement—such as new reactor construction or fuel cycle activity—could expose Rosatom to U.S. secondary sanctions, jeopardizing Moscow’s projects elsewhere.
“Rosatom is navigating its own delicate dance to avoid being susceptible to secondary sanctions,” said Esfandyar Batmanghelidj, the CEO of the Bourse & Bazaar Foundation, a think tank committed to economic development and diplomacy in the Middle East.
Similarly, China, once active in Iran’s nuclear development, has sharply curtailed cooperation— particularly in sensitive areas such as enrichment and reprocessing—under U.S. pressure. Today, firms such as China National Nuclear Corp. are reluctant to engage at a deeper level with Tehran’s nuclear industry due to the same sanction-related fears.
Even hard-line outlets linked to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, such as the Javan newspaper, have publicly acknowledged these disappointments, describing Iran’s economic ties with its eastern partners as largely symbolic. “Iran has, in recent years, championed slogans such as ‘looking East,’ ‘pivoting to Asia,’ and ‘breaking free from Western dependence,’ yet its current economic diplomacy falls far short of these ambitions,” the newspaper said recently. “There is no clear road map for sustainable engagement with China, Russia, or India; no functioning mechanisms to address banking, trade, or logistical hurdles with regional partners; and no meaningful track record of engagement with the private sector or economic stakeholders.”
Iran’s nuclear partnerships with Moscow and Beijing are more tactical than strategic—born out of necessity to compensate for the absence of Western engagement yet increasingly constrained by sanctions. Reformist media in Iran often depict these relationships as stopgaps to survive sanctions rather than genuine long-term alliances.
This absence of sustained nuclear-related cooperation has taken a heavy toll on Iran’s nuclear program. The country remains reliant on aging infrastructure and has struggled to make meaningful progress in building the additional reactors needed to meet its growing electricity demand—resulting in regular blackouts across the country. Notably, Iran’s capacity to refine is largely insufficient to cover its needs. Although Iran holds some of the world’s largest reserves of natural gas and crude oil, it faces a severe energy crisis driven by years of sanctions, poor management, old infrastructure, and wasteful consumption. On top of this, oil revenues are slumping, the rial continues to slide, and foreign investment has dried up. In this context, Iranian officials see Western—especially U.S.—investment not just in terms of capital but as access to advanced technology.
As Araghchi put it, the goal isn’t necessarily massive investment overnight. It’s about sanctions relief, know-how, and reentry into the global economy. If U.S. firms enter Iran’s nuclear market, the thinking goes, European and Asian firms will follow.
This vision, of course, faces some backlash within Iran. Calls for renewed economic engagement with the West—mainly championed by moderates, reformists, and technocrats—are often dismissed by hard-liners as naive. Even some centrists approach the idea of talking with the West for economic dividends with skepticism, citing the deep structural and legal barriers: from entrenched sanctions and banking restrictions to pervasive corruption and the lack of a reliable regulatory environment in Iran. But with Trump rewriting the rules of global diplomacy, a pool of Iranian policymakers sense a rare opening.
Araghchi’s proposal may well seem compelling to the Trump team, whose lead negotiator, Steve Witkoff, is new to nuclear talks. Araghchi said tens of billions of dollars in potential contracts were up for grabs.
But is such a deal possible? For Iran, retaining its nuclear capabilities has never been so important. After suffering serious setbacks to its so-called Axis of Resistance, Tehran now increasingly sees its nuclear program as the only route to achieving effective deterrence.
Many leading Republicans in the United States have ruled out continued uranium enrichment by Iran—and so has Trump and Witkoff on occasion. But Araghchi and other Iranian officials may well be betting that Trump’s negotiating team, lacking the experience of the JCPOA negotiators, will go for a flashy headline over the fine print.
“Iranians are trying to push these ideas because they are aware of nuclear issues far more than the United States,” said Richard Nephew, a senior research scholar at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy and a former U.S. negotiator on the JCPOA.
“They are putting dollar signs in front of a fishing line and throwing it,” he said. “Ultimately, part of the Iranian thinking is that Trump might just want to cut a shiny deal, even if it has hidden risks.”
But Araghchi never made clear what Iran could sacrifice regarding its centrifuges as part of such an agreement. Even if financial deals were made, it’s unlikely that Iran would allow U.S. experts access to sensitive nuclear facilities such as Natanz, given deep-seated fears of Israeli and U.S. espionage. Nor would it be willing to dismantle its enrichment infrastructure. The core problem remains unchanged: Iran retains enough centrifuges to produce weapons-grade material.
In reality, this isn’t a proposal for verification in exchange for investment; it’s a calculated bet that commercial entanglement alone might generate enough political inertia to keep Washington from exiting the deal again.
“Iranians are prepared to have a financial joint venture, but they won’t accept a technical one where Americans will have unfettered access to Natanz,” Nephew said.
From the U.S. perspective, even if Trump were tempted, the barriers for economic cooperation are huge. Iran’s banking system remains blacklisted by the Financial Action Task Force, cutting it off from global financial networks. Years of sanctions, corruption, and economic mismanagement have left its financial infrastructure deeply flawed. For foreign firms, navigating this terrain would mean legal headaches, reputational risk, and exposure to punitive U.S. measures still on the books.
More critically, the White House would face challenges in Congress. A Republican-led legislature is unlikely to back a deal that appears to legitimize uranium enrichment on Iranian soil. The idea that U.S. money might indirectly support the Natanz nuclear facility is politically radioactive. Hawks in Washington would almost certainly kill the proposal on arrival, regardless of the possible economic wins.
A more measured proposal—already put forward by Iranian diplomats in ongoing talks—is the creation of a regional uranium enrichment consortium that includes Saudi Arabia and other countries. But Riyadh remains cautious, preferring to develop its own program with U.S. backing. Iran’s existing enrichment infrastructure positions it as a potential contributor to a future Gulf nuclear supply chain, said Batmanghelidj, with Iranian fuel potentially powering reactors across the region, including in Saudi Arabia. Realizing such a vision, however, would demand significant political will from both sides.
Ultimately, Tehran knows the odds that U.S. companies would invest in the Iranian nuclear program are slim. But it’s hoping that just floating the idea can reset the conversation—and appeal to Trump’s core interests.
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