President Trump told reporters at the White House on Monday that Iran appeared to have rejected a key element of an American proposal aimed at breaking the deadlock in the negotiations over the future of the country’s nuclear program.
Iran wants to continue enriching uranium on Iranian soil, the president said, a step that would give it continued access to the fuel that could be used to make a nuclear weapon.
“They’re just asking for things that you can’t do,” Mr. Trump said at the end of an economic event with business and Wall Street leaders. “They don’t want to give up what they have to give up. You know what that is: They seek enrichment.”
Mr. Trump said U.S. and Iranian officials would meet on Thursday, but he did not say where or whether the session would be headed by his special envoy, Steve Witkoff. The president gave few specifics on Iran’s response to Mr. Witkoff’s most recent proposal, but said: “They have given us their thoughts on the deal, and I said, you know, it’s just not acceptable for it.”
Iran is rapidly producing near-bomb-grade uranium, as part of a program it insists is solely to produce fuel for civilian power plants. The Trump administration had wavered in its first months about whether to permit low-level enrichment, which Iran was able to do under a 2015 agreement with the Obama administration until Mr. Trump scrapped it three years later. Under the Obama-era agreement, Iran was producing a very limited amount of fuel, enriched to 3.67 percent.
Mr. Trump told reporters: “We can’t have enrichment. We want just the opposite, and so far, they’re not there. I hate to say that, because the alternative is a very, very dire one.”
As The New York Times reported, the Trump administration had proposed a preliminary arrangement that would have permitted Iran to continue to enrich uranium at low levels until an international consortium, which would include Iran and Arab states, began manufacturing fuel for customers around the Middle East. The idea was to block Iran’s ability to seize the fuel, enrich it to bomb-grade levels and produce a nuclear weapon. But the consortium would give it access to fuel for new nuclear power plants.
Based on Mr. Trump’s comments and Iranian statements in recent days, Iran rejected the part of the proposal that would remove all enrichment from Iranian territory.
Mr. Trump said he had spoken on Monday to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, who had been pressing Mr. Trump several months ago to join Israel in bombing the Iranian facilities. Mr. Trump said later that the request was “inappropriate” while he was engaged in negotiations.
David E. Sanger covers the Trump administration and a range of national security issues. He has been a Times journalist for more than four decades and has written four books on foreign policy and national security challenges.
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