Though we’re less than half a year into the second Trump administration, it’s already clear that some things are different this time around, including U.S. President Donald Trump’s apparent desire to seize the mantle of peacemaker and global dealmaker. From Ukraine, to Gaza, to Saudi Arabia, we’ve seen the White House open channels of communication, engage with adversaries, and tout arms sales and investment deals.
The most consequential of these efforts may well be the administration’s engagement with Iran. During Trump’s first term, he often allowed himself to be swayed by hawkish advisors who promoted a hardline, maximum pressure approach to Iran. This time around, he has another chance to find a pragmatic deal that reins in Iran’s nuclear ambitions and defuses regional tensions.
The stakes are high. The success or failure of Iran talks may well be the best indicator of whether this administration can follow through on its desire to put U.S. foreign policy on a sounder footing. Will it be able to refocus the United States firmly on the challenge from China, or will Trump—like every U.S. president since George W. Bush—find himself sucked into a Middle Eastern quagmire?
Throughout his first term, Trump’s advisors repeatedly told him that if he just increased the pressure on Tehran for long enough, he would be able to secure a “better deal” than former President Barack Obama had negotiated—the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA)—whether on the nuclear file or on other issues. This turned out to be entirely wrong. Advisors like Mike Pompeo, John Bolton, and H.R. McMaster pushed Trump toward hawkish policy tools. The result was a maximum pressure campaign that withdrew from the Obama-era nuclear deal, imposed a series of increasingly draconian sanctions, and engaged in targeted strikes on Iranian proxies—and, in one notable case, on Qassem Soleimani, a senior general in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. In many ways, this approach encouraged Iranian intransigence, and Iran showed no interest in reopening talks while Trump was in office.
It would take a set of unexpected regional shifts—the collapse of the Assad regime in Syria, the Israeli war in Lebanon, rapprochement between the Gulf states and Iran—to reopen the door to engagement. Today, Iran’s regional position is weaker, and its neighbors in the Gulf are mostly seeking peace. Tehran is eager to see a deal; the timing could not be more perfect for a president that wants to turn pressure into diplomatic results.
But if it is no surprise why Tehran is seeking negotiations, the Trump administration’s motivations are more difficult to understand. After all, many Republicans would be happy to see Trump resume his maximum pressure campaign on Iran—or even engage in military strikes to do so. And though few congressional Republicans would criticize him directly on this point, it’s notable that Republicans in both the Senate and the House have openly called on Trump to pursue an extremely hard line in negotiations, including the complete dismantlement of Iran’s nuclear program.
At a broader level, however, the administration’s decision to shift toward diplomacy is a vital component of its efforts to put U.S. foreign policy on a better footing and attempt to focus the U.S. military on the Indo-Pacific. Extricating the U.S. military from the Middle East is a clear priority for the administration. Trump, speaking on his recent trip to Saudi Arabia, repudiated the country’s long-standing Middle East policies, noting that “the so-called ‘nation-builders’ wrecked far more nations than they built.” U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance went further in a recent speech to U.S. Naval Academy graduates, promising the newly commissioned officers that there would be “no more undefined missions, no more open-ended conflicts.”
Their actions mostly back up this rhetoric. In recent months, Trump has mostly resisted assisting Israel in strikes on Iran and its proxies. Indeed, despite an early military campaign against the Houthis in Yemen, the White House was willing to halt strikes in exchange for Houthi concessions on international shipping. Meanwhile, the U.S. Defense Department recently issued interim strategic guidance, a precursor to the National Defense Strategy, which explicitly instructs the military to focus on the homeland and the Indo-Pacific, while “assuming risk” in other theaters.
Iran, in short, is a litmus test of whether the administration is serious about its commitment to strategic prioritization. Trump would hardly be the first president to fail to reorient U.S. defense strategy in this way; presidents since Obama have been trying and failing to “pivot to Asia.” Even in the first Trump administration, officials promised to focus on great-power competition, but were bogged down in the Middle East, fighting against the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq. Trump’s intuitions this time around—that commercial and diplomatic engagement with Iran may work better than isolation or airstrikes—may be better, but the risk of getting sucked into another Middle Eastern quagmire is still there. The key question is whether a deal can be reached or whether talks will collapse under unrealistic expectations from one side or the other.
Fortunately, reporting—and statements from both Iranian officials and Steve Witkoff, the U.S. special envoy to the Middle East—suggest the two sides are not far apart. Still, the remaining issues will be hard to bridge.
The primary issue on the U.S. side is the question of enrichment. Domestic Iranian enrichment has long been a source of contention, with Tehran claiming the right to a civilian nuclear program, and the United States advocating for all enrichment—the riskiest part of a civilian nuclear program for weaponization—to happen outside the country. The JCPOA allowed Iran to enrich domestically to low levels suitable for civilian use, with strict monitoring and inspections, though many Republicans argued at the time that the thresholds and standards applied were insufficient to block Iran’s pathway to a weapon.
Today, the Iranians have enriched uranium all the way to weapons grade and are estimated to be at most a few months away from the ability to build a nuclear weapon. It is, however, not the fact of domestic enrichment that created that reality, but rather the loss of safeguards and inspections on the program as tensions ratcheted up over the last few years.
Iran will obviously need to divest itself of existing high-enriched uranium as part of any new deal, and new thresholds on enrichment—potentially ones better than those reached in the JCPOA—can be put in place. There are also creative solutions that could be brought to bear: a pause on Iranian domestic enrichment that would allow a resumption in a few years, or a neighborhood consortium for enrichment that brings together Iran and some of its Gulf neighbors. Reporting suggests that the administration is undecided internally on this point; a leaked draft proposal from Witkoff’s team indicated these workarounds are being seriously considered, while the president’s social media account continues to call for “no enrichment of uranium.”
But a complete ban on domestic enrichment is perhaps the fastest way to ensure that no deal happens at all. Tehran has repeatedly highlighted that this is a red line for them in any deal. And perhaps more worryingly, the push for zero enrichment is coming from some of the same people who encouraged Trump to pull out of the JCPOA during his first term with the promise of a better deal. It seems increasingly clear that for many of these hawkish foreign-policy hands, there is no deal with Iran that they would consider sufficient.
And yet, a deal that includes verification and monitoring—along with strict standards for Iran’s domestic nuclear capabilities—is far better than the alternatives. It is certainly better than the status quo, in which Iran is effectively a nuclear threshold state, with the ability to achieve weapons status in short order.
And it is undoubtedly better than military strikes, which are likely to set Iran’s nuclear ambitions back by just a few years at most and risk a return to regional confrontation with Iran and its allies—one in which U.S. forces in the region are likely to become the primary targets. Military strikes will not solve the nuclear question—they will just push a clock to start ticking, counting down to the next time a president must decide between diplomacy and bombing.
It may sound like hyperbole to say that Iran negotiations are key to Trump’s foreign-policy legacy. After all, there are so many ongoing issues in the administration’s portfolio—from Ukraine to tariffs—that will undoubtedly have major global repercussions. Yet Iran negotiations may be the clearest indication of whether Trump and like-minded advisors inside his administration can actually succeed in shifting the United States away from mindless confrontations in the Middle East toward China and other challenges. If Trump is indeed the president who finally intends to break the United States’ addiction to Middle East interventions, then bombing Iran would be an extremely poor place to start. If he can negotiate a big, beautiful nuclear deal with Iran, on the other hand, perhaps the United States can finally begin its long overdue pivot to Asia.
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