United States Special Envoy to the Middle East Steve Witkoff and
Iranian Minister of Foreign Affairs Abbas Aragchi will resume nuclear
talks next week
The Trump administration will have two related challenges. The first
is keeping the negotiations moving forward at a sufficient pace to
constrain the Iranian nuclear program in an effective way. Iran has
sharply increased its production of highly enriched uranium since
Trump’s 2024 election, and in February the International Atomic Energy
Agency estimated they had enough material to be further enriched to
produce six nuclear weapons, with additional material for a bomb being
enriched every month. At minimum, the Trump administration will seek to
slow down enrichment.
The second challenge is not alarming the Israelis that it is giving
the Iranians too much in the negotiations. Israelis across the political
spectrum are united in seeing Iran as an existential threat. If they
fear Iran is getting too much from the negotiations Israel may seek to
scuttle them by acting unilaterally against Iran, either through overt
military means or covert tactics.
Ideally, the two challenges feed into each other, with the Americans
using the threat of Israeli action to drive the Iranians toward an
agreement, and the Iranians using the prospect of a large stockpile of
enriched uranium to push toward a deal. But much could go wrong,
including an Israeli attack that seeks to draw the US into the sort of
open-ended confrontation with the Iranians that the Trump administration
has long sought to avoid in the Middle East.
Gulf states are likely to quietly cheer both the negotiations and the
threat of Israeli action if the Iranians emerge with too much from
them. For years, they have sought their own immediate dialogue with the
Iranians while pushing outside powers to deter Iranian action. They see
their own security threats from Iran as an enduring problem that has
more to do with 2,000 years of Persian history than 45 years of the
Islamic Republic. Yet they also fear that any Iranian response to an
attack is likely to hit them—nearby soft targets—before it hits either
the United States or Israel. Israel’s ability to withstand Iranian air
attacks in April and October of last year, with the active support of
both the United States and its Arab neighbors, has diminished Iran’s
deterrent against Israel while making it more likely that Iran would
seek to strike targets closer to home.
For the Iranians, Trump is an enticing negotiating partner. In part,
he seems keen to make a deal, appears impatient, and does not seem
preoccupied with details. For an Iranian team that knows the nuclear
file backwards and forwards, Trump seems an easier prospect than his
predecessors. Perhaps even more importantly, Trump would negotiate from
“inside the tent” of Iranian critics. Given his own politics and his
record on Iran and on Israel, he is better positioned to defend a deal
than his predecessors were. They all battled Republican and pro-Israeli
critics. Similarly, it is hard to imagine that Israel or the Gulf Arab
states would be openly critical of a Trump deal with Iran the same way
they were of Obama’s Iran deal, the JCPOA in 2015.
Still, an agreement with Trump would bear the risk of him simply
ignoring it, as he seemed to do after he tweaked the 1994 North America
Free Trade Agreement in 2018 and rebranded it as the US-Mexico-Canada
Agreement (USMCA), and then threatened to unilaterally impose high
tariffs on Canada and Mexico by executive order since returning to the
White House in January 2025.
For Trump, negotiating with Iran is an obvious option to explore.
Partly, it reflects his penchant for negotiations and his confidence in
his negotiators. It also reflects his quest for a Nobel Peace Prize.
Coordinating closely with Israel over Iran was the principal reason
Netanyahu visited Trump earlier in April, for the second time in two
months. The potential for a division over Iran strategy is real, and the
potential grows the closer US and Iran talks get to an agreement.
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