Are the United States and Iran, adversaries for more than 45 years, on the cusp of striking a new nuclear agreement?
After two rounds of indirect diplomacy between high-ranking officials of the two powers, it’s still too early to answer that question with confidence. What is abundantly clear is that Washington and Tehran are at least trying to determine if there is a mutually agreeable deal to be had, one that will resolve the legitimate concerns of both sides and stave off a potential military conflict that neither President Trump nor Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei want.
The latter observation might seem surprising. Trump, after all, has threatened to bomb Iran multiple times over the last few weeks, most recently on April 17 when he told reporters in the Oval Office that it “would be very bad for Iran” if it didn’t make a deal. You don’t need an international relations degree to get Trump’s message.
However, Trump is also the man who chose to give diplomacy a chance rather than green-light Israel’s plans to militarily destroy Tehran’s nuclear program. The president blusters and brandishes a big stick, but he’s often reticent to use it, in part because starting wars is far easier than ending them. Surely the last thing Trump wants is to plunge the United States into another full-blown conflict in the Middle East, particularly when he has eviscerated America’s past wars in the region as expensive and stupid. If he thought the war in Iraq was a mistake — and it was — then launching a war against a country with more than double Iraq’s population, and with a government stronger today than Saddam Hussein’s was back in 2003, would be a gross error in judgment.
Which is why he’s rolling the dice on diplomacy. Thus far, the process has worked as well as anyone could expect. U.S. envoy Steve Witkoff and Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi are uttering the same notes about progress, and they have agreed to meet a third time this Saturday. But today’s progress can easily turn into tomorrow’s failure. There is no guarantee the ongoing diplomatic process will succeed.
The road to a nuclear accord is a long, difficult one made even more arduous by three key factors.
First, the Trump administration appears divided as to what the appropriate endgame for these negotiations should be. In Trump’s mind, the goal is clear: Iran can’t have a nuclear weapon. But he often changes his mind depending on who he last spoke with. Days after he tabled the relatively limited “no weapon” objective, Trump said, “Iran has to get rid of the concept of a nuclear weapon,” which implies that Tehran’s enrichment plants would need to be sealed up once and for all.
Witkoff has brainstormed about instituting a strict verification and monitoring program to ensure Tehran can’t weaponize its nuclear knowledge. Ironically, this sounds exactly like the deal Trump could have inherited if he hadn’t withdrawn from the Obama administration’s Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action in 2018.
Meanwhile, national security advisor Mike Waltz and Secretary of State Marco Rubio are talking as if Iran must give up everything, as the late Libyan dictator Moammar Kadafi did when he handed over his weapons of mass destruction to American inspectors in 2003 and 2004.
In short, there are competing factions within the Trump administration duking it out over Iran policy, and this debate will need to be settled before any substance is actually discussed with the Iranians. If Waltz and Rubio win out, the talks don’t have a leg to stand on.
Diplomacy will succeed or fail depending on how flexible the parties are at the negotiating table. U.S. demands must be reasonable, not maximalist. The same goes for Iran. According to press accounts, Iranian officials want Trump to guarantee that he or a future U.S. president won’t withdraw from any deal that is negotiated. Given the recent history of Washington pulling out of the JCPOA three years after it was signed, and then re-imposing sanctions on Iran, you can’t blame Khamenei for requesting it.
The problem is that no U.S. president can make that promise. The Trump administration will give Iran the same answer the Biden administration gave when it conducted its own talks with Iran in 2021 and 2022: No president can legally bind the choices of a future U.S. administration. Even a Senate-ratified treaty, the most durable international relations agreement the United States can have, doesn’t guarantee lasting implementation.
Presidents have withdrawn from treaties in the past — Trump withdrew from the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty and the Open Skies Treaty during his first term — and presidents will no doubt do so in the future. If Iran doesn’t budge on this issue or the two parties fail to come up with another arrangement that would at least promote accountability during the implementation stage, then diplomacy runs the risk of failing.
One thing is certain: The more progress the U.S. and Iran make toward a nuclear deal, the louder the critics of a diplomatic solution will be.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who convinced Trump to leave the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action in his first term, is publicly claiming he will only support an agreement that strips Tehran of its enrichment capability. But if the Iranians wouldn’t agree to that in 2004, when their nuclear program was much more rudimentary than it is now, it’s illogical to expect them to do so now. Netanyahu is deliberately pitching conditions Iran will reject outright, hoping this will persuade Trump to ditch diplomacy for military force. Trump needs to be prepared for this scenario and, unlike in his first term, willing to resist bad advice.
Although Trump will never admit this publicly, his negotiations with Iran now are an attempt to clean up a mess he created, and one the Biden administration did nothing to fix, when he scuttled the JCPOA. Time will tell if he can actually do it.
Daniel R. DePetris is a fellow at Defense Priorities
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