The United States expects to sign a potential framework of an agreement with Iran within “the next few days,” a senior administration official said on Friday, while emphasizing that it was hardly finished.
The official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the negotiations, said his confidence had climbed over the course of the day, from roughly 75 percent in the morning to “more like 80, 85 percent” in the afternoon.
The official kept underscoring the gap to certainty: No signing date or venue had been locked down, Iran’s internal decision-making was “very complicated,” and the two sides were “very close” but “not quite at the finish line yet.”
While the Trump administration is portraying the proposed agreement, known as a memorandum of understanding, as a major diplomatic victory, it basically establishes a 60-day cease-fire that would lead to another, far more complicated negotiation on sanctions relief and Iran’s nuclear program that could take months — or longer.
As the U.S. official laid it out, the agreement would reopen the Strait of Hormuz and lift the U.S. blockade of Iran’s ports.
The administration is hoping the initial agreement will lead to Iran committing to dismantle its nuclear program, handing its enriched uranium over to the United States to be destroyed on site and removed from the country, and the creation of a group responsible for enforcing the deal.
The U.S. official spoke only vaguely about the terms of the deal and said that the details of dismantling Iran’s nuclear program would have to be hashed out after the signing of the initial memorandum of understanding.
Signing that document would set off a 60-day negotiation to work out the mechanics of removing the nuclear material and decommissioning sites. The U.S. official said Iranian civilian and military intermediaries have attested that the Supreme Leader is “comfortable” with the deal, though he stopped short of confirming a direct sign-off.
Whether Iran will eventually agree to U.S. terms about the nuclear program in the later round of negotiations remains unclear, as is how quickly those talks might progress.
But the U.S. official’s central, repeated point was about the structure of the deal. Iran gets nothing simply for signing the memorandum, the official said, saying that any speculation about a multibillion-dollar payment going to Tehran as soon as the initial agreement is signed was flatly untrue.
Instead, the economic benefits would be released only as Iran lives up to its obligations under the agreement, the official said. If the Iranians turn over their highly-enriched uranium, they would get some financial relief; if they dismantle nuclear facilities, they would get something more.
The official did not say which nuclear sites would be dismantled or for how many years Iran must suspend its enrichment of uranium, which has been a sticking point in talks. Nor did the official say how the Iranians would dig out and eliminate the nation’s stockpile of nuclear fuel, much of which was buried under the rubble of the Isfahan nuclear facility when the United States bombed it a year ago.
The official claimed that the agreement would also lead to a broader regional peace framework — one, he said, that would cover Israel, Lebanon, the Persian Gulf states and Iran, with Tehran ending its financing of regional armed groups in exchange for guarantees about its own territorial sovereignty. In return, Iran would get relief from economic sanctions and a path back into the global economy.
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