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| A 3D-printed miniature model of President Donald Trump and the flags of the United States and Iran. (Dado Ruvic/Reuters) |
| Almost seven years ago, President Donald Trump abandoned the nuclear deal with Iran. The pact with Tehran had taken years of diplomacy and political pressure by his predecessor, former president Barack Obama. It was brokered alongside world powers, including European partners as well as Russia and China. But Trump declared the agreement “one of the worst and most one-sided transactions the United States has ever entered into” and reneged on the American end of the bargain. He unilaterally reimposed sanctions on Iran that had been lifted to win curbs on Tehran’s uranium enrichment capabilities and strict international monitoring of its nuclear facilities. By most accounts, the deal was keeping a lid on Iran’s nuclear capabilities. But Trump believed it gave Iran too many concessions and didn’t do enough to check its nonnuclear activities, including its long-standing support for a network of militant proxies across the Middle East. “If we do nothing, we know exactly what will happen,” Trump said at the time, justifying his decision to break from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA — the formal name for the agreement forged in 2015. “In just a short period of time, the world’s leading state sponsor of terror will be on the cusp of acquiring the world’s most dangerous weapons,” Trump added.
The reality is that Iran is now theoretically far closer to building a nuclear weapon than it was before the collapse of the JCPOA. The effects of Trump’s first term “maximum pressure” campaign lingered through the administration of former president Joe Biden, whose limited attempts at diplomacy with Iran bore little fruit. Iran turbocharged its enrichment operations, while its proxies in Lebanon, Iraq and Yemen clashed with U.S. forces and their allies. But, amid the chaos of his second term, Trump is trying to mend fences. On Saturday, his special envoy, the jet-setting real estate developer Steve Witkoff, will lead a team to meet with Iranian officials in Muscat, the capital of Oman. The goals of the summit — which the Americans have cast as “direct” talks but the Iranians have, for optics, tried to claim are “indirect” — are modest. But Trump has signaled a clear desire to avoid a military escalation and to hatch a new deal with the Iranians. The mood of the moment seems a departure from his first term, during which Trump, flanked by a cast of Iran hawks in his Cabinet, routinely rattled the saber at Tehran and authorized the assassination of top Iranian commander Gen. Qasem Soleimani. “I’m not asking for much … but they can’t have a nuclear weapon,” Trump told reporters this week. Iranian officials have changed their tone, as well. Authorities formally reprimanded a hard-line newspaper this week for a column that predicted Trump’s assassination — an unusual move for a regime steeped in decades of anti-American sloganeering. On Tuesday, the country’s foreign minister, Seyed Abbas Araghchi, published an op-ed in The Washington Post in which he spoke in language plainly intended for Trump’s ears, panning the failure of an earlier round of negotiations on Biden’s “lack of real determination” and gesturing to the “trillion-dollar opportunity” awaiting American companies inside Iran should diplomacy succeed. Alex Vatanka, an Iran expert at the Middle East Institute, a Washington-based think tank, suggested that the overtures in Araghchi’s op-ed reflect the vulnerability of an Iranian regime that has faced tremendous popular unrest at home and wants to avoid the possibility of U.S. or Israeli military strikes on its critical infrastructure. “It tells you that Iran is an awkward place,” he told me, adding that the implicit goal of the op-ed was a “whisper” to Trump “that we respect you in ways we never respected Biden.” The White House may feel a degree of urgency, too. The mechanism at the United Nations to “snapback” U.N. sanctions against Iran is set to expire this year. And even as he periodically threatens Iran with further military strikes, Trump may want to see genuine diplomatic momentum with Tehran before his scheduled trip to the Middle East next month. “I think he wants to deal with Iran with respect,” Witkoff said of Trump’s intentions in an interview with right-wing media host Tucker Carlson. “He wants to build trust with them if it’s possible. And that’s his directive to his administration. And hopefully that will be met positively by the Iranians.” Trump has been vague about what he hopes a new deal with Iran may yield. A return to the strictures imposed by the JCPOA seems unlikely given the advances of Iran’s nuclear program and Trump’s own pride. But a more far-reaching deal on other elements of Iran’s foreign policy and weapons programs is even tougher to envision. Some hawks in Washington, including Trump’s national security adviser, Michael Waltz, have floated the “full dismantlement” of Iran’s nuclear program — what some analysts cast as the “Libya” model after Libyan dictator Moammar Gaddafi’s decision to eliminate his nation’s nuclear-weapons program in 2003. (The move, though, deprived Gaddafi of a deterrent to stave off the Western military intervention that led to his demise in 2011.) “It’s far more likely that these talks are fruitful if they are narrow,” Vatanka said, “but if there’s talk of Libya-style dismantlement — that’s politically something this regime can’t do.” But the devil is in the details, and Trump’s team isn’t brimming with experts. “You’re not negotiating a final price tag or a grand bargain, but highly technical issues like uranium enrichment levels, centrifuge specifications and inspection regimes,” Karim Sadjadpour, an Iran analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told the New York Times. “There is an ocean of space between saying that Iran can’t have a nuclear weapon and that Iran’s nuclear program must be ‘dismantled’ like Libya’s. There is a risk that the U.S. side, which currently lacks clear expertise and a defined endgame, will be out-negotiated by an Iranian side that has both.” Ali Vaez of the International Crisis Group noted that “if the two sides can find enough common ground on the question of the acceptable scale of Iran’s nuclear program and the [scope of future talks], they could hold more structured, technical — and direct — discussions.” But if the process collapses, and further sanctions get slapped on Iran, one may see a scenario where Iran could withdraw from the U.N.’s nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which would scrap any outside efforts to monitor its activities. “It’s not clear what the precise trigger for Israeli or U.S. military action would be, but if diplomacy fails, Trump has implied that bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities is the ‘obvious’ option,” Vaez wrote. | ||||||||||||||||