For months, policymakers in Washington have portrayed the U.S. nuclear standoff with Iran as an either/or situation: Either Tehran agrees to curb its nuclear program, or the United States will attack it. U.S. President Donald Trump continues to warn of violent consequences if Iran spurns an agreement, claiming that only two alternatives exist for dismantling Iranian nuclear facilities—“blow them up nicely or blow them up viciously.”
But this is a false binary—merely a rhetorical device designed to manufacture urgency to make U.S. military threats against Iran more credible and, possibly, to justify a potential war to the American public.
A third, better option exists: the status quo. Washington should admit that Iranian nuclear latency isn’t an emergency, but rather a long-standing reality. The United States already lives with a near-nuclear Iran and has for quite some time. Denying this unfortunate truth will only hurt U.S. interests. Yet Washington continues to tilt at nuclear windmills, as if it were possible to send Iran back to a pre-atomic age.
U.S. special envoy Steve Witkoff has repeatedly declared that Washington will not tolerate any uranium enrichment by Iran, calling the issue “one very, very clear red line.” Underlining Trump’s warnings, more than 200 Republican lawmakers have endorsed the no-enrichment position and attendant threats made by Trump, Vice President J.D. Vance, and others to attack Iran unless it makes a deal.
Politely, they need to get real. Iran has been quietly enriching uranium to 60 percent purity since April 2021, meaning that it has already mastered the nuclear fuel cycle and could produce 90 percent enriched, weapons-grade uranium at will—it has just chosen not to.
Indeed, Iran’s nuclear breakout timeline was “at zero” back in June 2022, according to one assessment. But that estimate is conservative with regards to nuclear latency, which experts define as a country “developing the dual-use technology needed to make nuclear weapons without going all the way to a bomb.” Iran arguably crossed the threshold for nuclear latency in 2010, when it announced that it had successfully enriched uranium to 20 percent purity.
The enrichment learning curve is extremely steep, and once a country can build centrifuges that enrich up to 20 percent, it has already overcome roughly 90 percent of the technical hurdles that stand in the way of achieving weapons-grade enrichment.
There’s more to obtaining the bomb than just making the fuel. Iran would need to assemble a weapon, which takes six to 12 months, plus time to build and perfect a delivery system. Encouragingly, Iran hasn’t yet taken those steps, according to U.S. intelligence assessments.
But assembling the bomb is the easy part. Producing weapons-grade uranium is the real technical obstacle—and Iran cracked that nut years ago.
Iran’s decision to enrich to 60 percent purity but stop short of 90 percent is noteworthy because 60 percent enriched uranium has no purpose beyond signaling technological capacity: It isn’t pure enough for nuclear weapons, but it far exceeds what’s necessary for civilian applications.
As proliferation expert Robert E. Kelley put it, by enriching to 60 percent, Iran is sending “a political message: ‘We have gone as far as we can go in response to provocations without producing weapons-grade uranium.’”
And indeed, with sanctions, military threats, and clandestine sabotage operations, the United States and Israel have spent the past decade inadvertently encouraging Iran to weaponize. Iran’s recent progress occurred in three major leaps, all of them directly motivated by hostile U.S. or Israeli actions.
The first critical juncture was the disintegration of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the 2015 deal that limited Iran’s nuclear program by capping uranium enrichment at 3.67 percent, restricting the number and type of centrifuges that Iran could operate, setting ceilings on stockpiled nuclear material, and establishing a stringent monitoring system, among other provisions. Trump unilaterally withdrew from the deal in 2018 and reimposed sanctions on Iran despite Iran’s documented compliance with the accord, as certified by members of Trump’s own administration as late as July 2017.
The JCPOA didn’t collapse immediately. Iran continued to observe its core provisions for a full year after the U.S. withdrawal. What finally induced Iran to suspend participation was an overtly threatening U.S. military gesture in May 2019—sailing the USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier near Iran “to send a clear and unmistakable message to the Iranian regime,” according to then-National Security Advisor John Bolton. A few months after declaring the JCPOA void, Iran began enriching uranium up to 4.5 percent purity, exceeding the JCPOA threshold.
Iran’s next major step came in December 2020, when it declared its intention to enrich uranium up to 20 percent purity, the maximum level that it had attained before the JCPOA had been put into place. That happened less than a week after a prominent Iranian nuclear scientist, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, was assassinated on Iranian soil by Israeli agents.
Finally, Iran’s decision in April 2021 to pursue uranium enrichment up to 60 percent—its highest level ever—was announced just two days after it alleged that its nuclear facility at Natanz was sabotaged by Israel.
The pattern is unmistakable: When Iran feels threatened, it moves closer to a bomb. It’s a classic case of the security dilemma, wherein defensive actions by one side appear aggressive to the other, prompting a spiral of escalation. By framing Iran’s behavior as irrational or malevolent, Washington risks blinding itself to the logic of self-preservation that drives Tehran.
Of course, the security dilemma works both ways, and Iran’s actions have created and exacerbated fears that it intends to weaponize. Iran deceptively advanced its nuclear ambitions in the 1990s and 2000s, hiding nuclear facilities from international inspectors and failing to report nuclear fuel transfers in contravention to its commitments under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. The international community only learned of the Natanz uranium enrichment site and Arak heavy water facility in 2002, when their existence was revealed by Iranian dissidents. The resulting outcry pressured Iran to accept more stringent inspections in 2003 and halt its secret weapons program the same year, according to a 2007 U.S. intelligence assessment.
Nevertheless, the binary—deal or war—is not just false, but also dangerous. Not only is military action unlikely to eliminate Iran’s nuclear capability—it would also almost certainly guarantee the outcome that it seeks to prevent: an Iranian bomb. If the United States attacks Iran, why wouldn’t Iran escalate again and finally build one?
So why is the Trump administration pushing for a deal when it’s already too late, technologically speaking, to prevent Iranian proliferation? Inertia might be the culprit. When the nuclear negotiation saga first started over 20 years ago, Iran had not yet begun uranium enrichment. There were real prospects for a deal to prevent Iran from ever learning how to indigenously build a nuclear program. That’s changed over the past two decades, but U.S. thinking hasn’t.
Instead of saber-rattling to scare Iran into a deal, the United States should simply step back. That would be an about-face in policy, but this administration has already proven that it can make dizzying turns and stick the landing. Earlier this month, Trump reversed his policy on the Houthis, ending a fruitless bombing campaign that cost more than $1 billion in its first three weeks. He also lifted sanctions on Syria that had been in place for decades. Dropping demands on Iran would be just another Tuesday in Trump world.
What a U.S. de-escalation looks like in practice matters far less than making sure that one occurs, but there are any number of ways that Trump could finesse a reversal. He could embrace a deal that repackages the JCPOA, herald it as a breakthrough, and trust that his party will fall in line to support it. He could exit negotiations entirely and claim that the Iranians quietly promised never to build a bomb, mirroring his assertions about how talks with the Houthis unfolded. He could meet face-to-face with Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian, declare him an “attractive guy” with a “strong past”—just as he praised Syrian leader Ahmed al-Sharaa—and lift sanctions based on a handshake. This is Trump, after all; he’s nothing if not a political escape artist.
Israel may be affronted by the reversal, but diplomatic fallout is a feature, not a bug, of Trump’s foreign-policy style. He is a president who seems to embrace a “madman” theory of international relations, believing that he gains bargaining leverage by appearing less than sane.
Of course, dismissing Israeli concerns carries risks, including the possibility that Israel would attempt to strike Iran’s nuclear program, which could trigger Iran to weaponize anyway. But Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is unlikely to take those extreme measures, because Israel would need U.S. missile defense capabilities to counter the inevitable Iranian retaliation. This, combined with the considerable support that the United States has lent Israel since Oct. 7, 2023, are powerful reasons for Netanyahu to want to remain in Trump’s good graces.
The United States doesn’t need to make a deal-or-war ultimatum. Iranian nuclear latency is a status quo that has been stable for years, albeit uncomfortably so. Perhaps the best way to prevent a bomb is to stop giving a country so many reasons to want one.
The post The False Binary at the Heart of Trump’s Iran Strategy appeared first on Foreign Policy.
