White House special envoy Steve Witkoff and Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi are expected to discuss a nuclear deal on Friday in Istanbul aimed at staving off an imminent U.S. military attack, two officials from the region who are involved in the effort said.
Plans for the meeting follow strenuous efforts by Turkey, Qatar, Egypt and other Middle East countries to narrow the gaps between Washington and Tehran and persuade them to restart talks that ended last June with Israeli and U.S. air attacks on Iran’s nuclear facilities, according to the officials.
The Turkish, Qatari and Egyptian foreign ministers, as well as counterparts from Saudi Arabia, Oman and Pakistan, are also expected to attend the meeting, according to one official in the region, one of several who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive diplomacy. President Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who has been at Witkoff’s side in negotiations on Ukraine and Gaza, will also attend, the official said.
Witkoff is already in the region for meetings in Israel. Araghchi met in Turkey on Friday with Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan, and Qatari Prime Minister Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani visited Tehran over the weekend.
The promise of attendance by regional foreign ministers may help pave the way to direct negotiations between the U.S. and Iranian envoys. During talks last year that ended with Israel’s attack and the U.S. bombing of nuclear sites, Iran agreed only to “indirect” discussions between technical teams, with Witkoff and Araghchi only reportedly meeting for a handshake.
The White House did not immediately respond to questions about upcoming talks. “I’d like to see a deal negotiated,” Trump told reporters Monday. “I don’t know that that’s going to happen … right now we’re talking to them. We’re talking to Iran. And if we could work something out, that’d be great. And if we can’t … probably bad things would happen.”
One U.S. official said there was “still a lot of work” to be done before the Istanbul meeting is confirmed. A spokesman for Iran’s foreign ministry, Esmaeil Baqaei, did not confirm that a meeting has been scheduled, but said Tehran is studying the “framework” for possible talks.
The two regional officials said Washington’s Arab and Turkish allies are seeking to limit the scope of the talks to Iran’s nuclear program in order to get Iran to “yes.”
“If the talks happen, they will stay focused on Iran’s nuclear program,” said one. “And then we will try to find innovative ways to address Washington’s nonnuclear demands.”
Trump has said since his first term, when he pulled out of a 2015 deal negotiated by the Obama administration to scale back and limit Iran’s nuclear activities, that Tehran must never have a nuclear weapon. But Trump has also been maximalist in his demands on other things, like support for regional proxy groups and militias.
“Iran may never say it will stop supporting non-state actors that are aligned with it in the region,” said Ali Vaez, the Iran project director at International Crisis Group. “But it could come to an agreement with the U.S. on nonaggression, which could extend to both sides’ respective allies in the region.”
In an interview Sunday with CNN, Araghchi said that “I see the possibility of another talk if the U.S. negotiation team follow what President Trump said, to come to a fair and equitable deal to ensure there is no nuclear weapons. … This is what he said in one of his latest posts. So if that is the case,” Araghchi said, “I’m confident that we can achieve a deal.”
Trump has sent an armada of warships, including an aircraft carrier strike group, and positioned additional aircraft to effectively surround Iran, a deployment similar — but larger — to what he assembled in the Caribbean to stop alleged drug smuggling boats.
When he first started scaling up U.S. deployments in the Middle East last month, Trump said they would provide “help” to Iranians being shot and arrested in large-scale protests across the country. By the time the assets arrived in the region, however, protests had largely stopped. Since then, Trump has reiterated that his main goal is to force Iran to eliminate an enrichment program he says is moving toward producing a nuclear weapon.
Iran has consistently denied that it intends to weaponize uranium enrichment for military purposes.
But in addition to ending support for proxies in Iraq, Lebanon, Yemen and elsewhere, the Trump administration has also demanded that Tehran move to a third country nearly 900 pounds of highly enriched, near-weapons-grade uranium the International Atomic Energy Agency said it already has amassed and curtail its missile development program.
“Let’s do not talk about impossible things,” Araghchi told CNN. “Let’s focus on what is possible and do not lose the opportunity to achieve a fair and equitable deal to ensure no nuclear weapons. … That is achievable even in a short period of time.”
Russia, an Iran ally, has indicated it would accepted the enriched material. But Ali Bagheri, deputy secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, said Monday that they have “no intention of transferring enriched nuclear stockpiles to any country and the negotiations are not about such an issue at all,” Iran’s semiofficial Mehr News Agency reported.
Vaez said that another possible compromise is suspending further enrichment without explicitly eliminating Iran’s right to enrich, which it claims under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
“Zero enrichment is the reality on the ground,” Vaez said, given that much of Iran’s nuclear infrastructure was destroyed by last summer’s airstrikes and the highly enriched material is believed to be deeply buried under many tons of rubble. “That realization allows Iran the kind of flexibility that they didn’t have in the past, because to stop enrichment was a bridge too far for them, but to codify the suspension of enrichment … is something that under the current circumstances, Iran appears willing to do.”
Both countries have engaged in extreme public rhetoric, adding to the difficulty of knowing where compromise may lie. In remarks on Sunday, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei warned that “Americans should know that if they start a war this time, it would be a regional war,” according to widespread accounts in the Iranian media.
“They seek to occupy Iran and restore their dominance over its resources, oil, politics, security and international relations, just as during the Pahlavi era,” he said in a reference to the 1979 revolution that ousted the U.S.-backed shah.
Iran, whose security forces are far better armed and organized than those of Venezuela, has threatened severe retaliation in the event a U.S. attack, saying it knows the location of extensive U.S. bases in the region.
The flurry of regional diplomatic interventions to both Tehran and Washington comes from fear they, too, could be in the crosshairs of Iranian retaliation.
“It’s rare for Trump to be hearing the same message from Pakistan, from Saudi Arabia, from Qatar, from Oman, from Iraq and from Turkey,” Vaez said. “They’re all saying the same thing because everybody understands the high cost of escalation.”
Michael Birnbaum contributed to this report.
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