Only minutes into a phone call to a New York Times reporter to explain the deal he had just agreed to with Iran, President Trump turned to an issue that clearly grates on him: the comparisons to the deal that President Barack Obama struck with Tehran in 2015.
The Obama deal, he said on Sunday evening, repeating a well-worn line, was “a disaster.”
“It was a road to a nuclear weapon and ours is a wall against a nuclear weapon in the truest sense of the word,” Mr. Trump said. “So let’s start there.”
Mr. Trump’s sensitivity is easy to understand. He campaigned against the Obama-era deal as far back as 2015, and ultimately killed it during his first term over the objections of many of his top national security aides. At the time, he had a long list of complaints about its failings. The 2015 accord “lifted crippling economic sanctions on Iran in exchange for very weak limits on the regime’s nuclear activity,” Mr. Trump said in a 2018 speech, and “no limits at all on its other malign behavior,” especially its support of terror activities around the Middle East.
Many of Mr. Trump’s critiques were justified, and often shared by Democrats. But now, Mr. Trump is caught in what could best be described as the Obama-deal bind.
The accord he described on Sunday is simply a cease-fire and an agreement to fully open the Strait of Hormuz for 60 days. It commits both sides to begin negotiating on the future of the nuclear program. So for now, there is no way to compare the old and new deals; they are completely different in nature.
Yet Mr. Trump clearly knows he must significantly improve upon Mr. Obama’s results in order to justify the huge human and economic cost of taking the United States to war over the past three months. Now comes the test.
The 2015 deal resulted in shipping about 97 percent of Iran’s nuclear stockpile at the time out of the country. The fate of the current stockpile, a far more dangerous one, is undetermined. There is no resolution about how to deal with future nuclear research and enrichment activities inside Iran, or whether all of its major nuclear sites will be shut down. There is no discussion yet about limits on its missiles or of resumed support for what is left of militias it supports, such as Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis.
Vice President JD Vance has acknowledged the scope of the tasks ahead, which begin Friday in Switzerland as soon as he and Iran’s top parliamentarian conduct a ceremonial signing of the memorandum of understanding. Mr. Trump insists that it won’t be that hard. “We have our deal done with Iran,” Mr. Trump said Tuesday at a Group of 7 summit in France. “It goes to a second stage, which I think will be actually easier.”
He may be the only one who thinks so. The 2015 deal took 18 months to negotiate. It is more than 150 pages long, filled with specific benchmarks of progress and technical annexes, including pages on how the nuclear program monitored and inspected.
“What he has to do is even harder than what we had to do in 2015, because we did not have to deal with a stockpile of uranium close to what is needed for a nuclear weapon,” said Wendy Sherman, who led the 2015 negotiating team. And, Ms. Sherman argued, the Trump administration has yet to assemble the kind of team they will require: “You need lawyers, Treasury experts, energy experts, inspection experts.”
In fact, in the run-up to the 2015 negotiations, the hotels where the accord was being hammered out were jammed with such expertise. That included Ernest Moniz, the energy secretary who was also a nuclear weapons expert; the C.I.A.’s chief of Iran intelligence; and Americans who had worked with inspection teams from the International Atomic Energy Agency.
With a 60-day sprint ahead, beginning Friday, to reach a deal, Mr. Trump’s special envoy, Steve Witkoff, and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, have clearly been racing to assemble a similar team. A few weeks ago they visited the Oak Ridge National Laboratory for a day with nuclear experts on such arcana as what kind of equipment would be required to recover the 60-percent enriched uranium and “downblend,” or dilute, it. They are expected to be nearby as talks begin in Switzerland.
The Iranians are hardly showing up unprepared. The foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, who is the main interlocutor with Mr. Witkoff, was the No. 2 Iranian official at the talks 11 years ago. At that time, he often briefed reporters, and it was evident that he had an encyclopedic knowledge of Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, from its uranium mining operations to its enrichment facilities at Natanz and Fordo, to the critical operations at Isfahan, where Iran was developing the ability to turn uranium to a metallic form — which could be fashioned into a warhead. (All three sites were hit with American bunker-busting bombs or missiles a year ago this weekend, in “Operation Midnight Hammer,” which left many of Iran’s most critical nuclear facilities under rubble.)
Mr. Trump’s national security team is brimming with confidence, at least in public, that when negotiations start up, they will hold cards the Obama team never enjoyed.
“Obama, they begged Iran for a deal,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth argued on CBS News’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday. “We bombed Iran, and then put in a blockade,” he said, and resumed bombing a week ago “to ensure that they come to the table for a great deal.” He insisted that the American military would remain offshore to make sure the Iranians “live up to what they said they would do.”
“They didn’t have the threat of military force the way that we do,” Mr. Hegseth said of the Obama team.
Mr. Trump picked up on that theme in his call on Sunday, saying, “I believe they have had enough,” and noting that the Iranians had been hit by two waves of American attacks. “We were going in for the big one,” he said, adding: “And we made a deal right after that.”
What Mr. Trump and Mr. Hegseth left out of their account is that the Iranians have plenty of cards of their own this time that they lacked 11 years ago. They have discovered a diplomatic superpower: the ability to shut down the Strait of Hormuz just by dropping a few mines and launching a few drones. That is enough to make shipowners and captains hesitate before taking the risk of running through the narrow waterway. The Iranians also have shown they can reach and destroy water desalination plants, American radar arrays and petrochemical plants across the region.
And back in 2015, the most potent nuclear material Iran possessed was enriched to only 20 percent purity, which would have required weeks or months of further enrichment to be useful in a bomb. Now they have 60 percent enriched fuel, which can be turned into bomb-grade in days or weeks — if they can dig it out of the rubble of Isfahan without getting caught.
In his interview, Mr. Trump repeatedly came back to the Obama accord, stating incorrectly that it would have “allowed them to enrich all the way up to a nuclear weapon.” In fact, it limited enrichment to 3.67 percent, which is used for reactors, not atomic weapons. But one of the flaws of the Obama accord, as Mr. Trump noted in the 2016 presidential campaign, is that it allowed the Iranians to keep working on next-generation centrifuges and conducting very limited enrichment.
And the Obama deal was designed to expire in 2030. Mr. Trump talked in the interview about the possibility of agreeing to a 15-to-20-year suspension of enrichment activities in the coming negotiations, meaning the deal would essentially lift restrictions between 2041 and 2046. That would buy some time. But buying time was the strategy of the Obama deal as well.
The real challenge for Mr. Trump may be getting past his own rhetoric — including that speech in 2018 that took on Mr. Obama’s deal for what it failed to accomplish.
The 2015 agreement had plenty of flaws. The Iranians refused to negotiate over the size of their missile arsenal or its range. The new memorandum of understanding is apparently silent on the topic, so the issue will have to be dealt with in the next round of negotiations.
The 2015 deal did not prevent Iran from funding terror groups. There is also apparently nothing in the memorandum on that topic, or of its treatment of protesters and dissidents to whom Mr. Trump promised, earlier this year, “help is on the way.” (In a social media post on Jan. 13, he also urged them to “take over your institutions.”)
In his call on Sunday, Mr. Trump insisted that Iran would only get sanctions relief if it changed its behavior, including refraining from shooting protesters. But he also indicated he was in no hurry to seize that uranium or get it out of the country. Sitting under the rubble, he noted, it poses no imminent threat.
So the big question is whether there will be a follow-on deal at all. “He hasn’t gotten to the second part of anything — in Ukraine or Gaza,” said Ms. Sherman, who went on to be deputy secretary of state under President Joseph R. Biden Jr.
But if he does go the distance, if he successfully negotiates every concession he insists the Iranians are now ready to make in return for financial incentives, then he may well have an accord that goes well beyond the 2015 deal.
He just doesn’t have it yet.
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