BOTTOM LINE UP FRONT - In the early days of the Trump administration, talk of peace deals and ceasefires were focused on the wars in Ukraine and in Gaza. Nearly 3 months later, the Russia-Ukraine negotiations are faltering, and a Gaza cease-fire has collapsed, but there is fresh hope on a third geopolitical front: negotiations for a new agreement to ensure that Iran does not obtain a nuclear weapon.
Iranian and U.S. negotiators met in Oman Saturday, the first high-level talks between the two countries in years. The fact that the meeting happened at all was taken as a good sign; then came pronouncements from both sides that the initial conversations had been productive, and an agreement to hold another round this weekend. Perhaps most telling were comments by U.S. envoy Steve Witkoff and President Trump himself saying that the U.S. does not seek the dismantling of Iran's nuclear program – only that it never be permitted to possess a nuclear weapon. “I’m not asking for much, they can’t have a nuclear weapon,” the president said. “I want them to thrive. I want Iran to be great.”
The positive signals were something of a surprise, given hostile rhetoric from Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei (he called the U.S. “a bullying government”) and the fact that President Trump, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and National Security Advisor Mike Waltz, had all taken a hard line against Iran. During his first term, President Trump pulled the United States out of the landmark 2015 nuclear deal.
CONTEXT
- In 2015, Iran and six world powers (the P5+1, including the U.S., Russia, China, the UK, France and Germany) signed the landmark Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), limiting Iran’s nuclear activities in exchange for sanctions relief.
- President Donald Trump unilaterally withdrew the U.S. from the JCPOA in May 2018. He called it “a horrible, one-sided deal” and reimposed sanctions on Iran in what he termed part of a “maximum pressure” campaign.
- In February of this year the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) reported that Iran had accelerated its enrichment of uranium, and that its stockpile of uranium enriched to 60% fissile purity — close to the bomb grade level of 90% — had grown by half since December to 274.8 kg.
- A March report in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists said that if Iran chose to take the final “breakout” steps to create a weapon, it could produce as many as ten nuclear bombs within one month.
- President Trump has called for a “better deal” with Iran, and he reached out after his inauguration to Iran’s Supreme Leader. Iran and the U.S. held talks in Muscat Saturday, mediated by Oman. A second meeting is reportedly planned for this weekend.
THE EXPERTS
After the talks in Oman, The Cipher Brief spoke with former senior State Department official and Johns Hopkins University professor Vali Nasr; Paula Doyle, who served as CIA Associate Deputy Director of Operations and worked on counterproliferation issues in CIA; and Alex Vatanka, Senior Fellow at the Middle East Institute. We asked for their assessments as to whether these new talks might lead to a breakthrough, or at least an interim arrangement to stall Iran’s progress.
The interviews have been edited for length and clarity. The full interviews can be seen on our YouTube channel.
I think it has been productive and constructive. I think the most important thing for the Iranians was to understand whether by saying Iran cannot have nuclear weapons, does President Trump mean just that? Or does he mean that they cannot have a nuclear program at all? Because they could always negotiate over the first, as they did with the Obama administration, but the second one would be a no-go for them. They wouldn't accept having no nuclear activity at all.
And I think the Americans wanted to know whether the Iranians are actually willing to very quickly put markers on the ground, namely what are they willing to do, how quickly are they willing to negotiate, and so on. I think both came away having got what they wanted. So they put the most positive spin on the negotiations and they very quickly settled on a date to meet a second time.
There is significant daylight [between the U.S. and Israel] on this. And even within the [Trump] administration, there has been significant daylight. The national security adviser, the secretary of state, and some of the president's allies in the Senate have basically taken Israel's side, privately arguing for striking Iran first, and saying that actually what President Trump will ask for is the dismantlement of Iran's nuclear program in its entirety.
Then you've had the special envoy of the president, Mr. Witkoff, tell Tucker Carlson and other media outlets that no, all we're after is that Iran would not have a bomb. And President Trump himself, just a few days before the talks, said what we're asking is for Iran to not have nuclear weapons. That's it.
The Iranians are also confused about which is it. Are you asking us to basically give up everything, what is called the Libya model — Libya gave up its nuclear program in its entirety — or are you saying that you want guarantees that we're not weaponizing? That could be achieved, as the first nuclear deal did, by intrusive inspections, a reduction of Iran's stockpile, forbidding enrichment beyond a certain point, et cetera. And so I think for the Iranians, the very first point in Oman was to get assurance as to which it is. Is it what the national security advisor said, or is it what the president said? Is it what Israel says, or is it what the president says?
If the objective is for Iran to be far away from breakout capability of having enough fissile material for making a bomb, that its program would be highly supervised by the IAEA, and in exchange the United States would lift sanctions on Iran and allow a certain degree of integration of Iran's economy into the global economy – that's very similar to the 2015 deal. The terms may differ. I think this time around, the Iranians will insist that they're not going to do everything upfront. They want some guarantees that the deal will have resilience, that the U.S. will not again back out of it. And I'm sure the Americans would want certain things to be more stringent than the first time.
[The dismantling or destruction of the whole nuclear program is] an unrealistic goal. Those who advocate [for that] are really advocating for war with Iran, except they're setting up a diplomatic straw man that would basically fail, and then you would say, OK, let's go to war — which is exactly what Prime Minister Netanyahu said, that if it's not total dismantling, then let's go to war.
We know that President Trump doesn't like war. The last thing he wants is an endless war in the Middle East. You can start a war with Iran, but there's no assumption that this will not escalate into something bigger. The Gulf countries, they're assuming that there's no such thing as limited war. That's why it was the UAE who carried President Trump's offer of negotiations to Tehran.
Iran is weaker. That brings it to the table. So the best you can hope is that you bully the Iranians to the table and then you put pressure on them to get to a diplomatic resolution that means no weapons, and in exchange you would be willing to give them certain things that they need. And if that takes Iran away from being close to a bomb, I think that's victory for President Trump.
The window is very narrow, assuming that their nuclear facilities are not bombed by Israel or the U.S. in the event of a collapse of the talks. And we really don't know how vulnerable the entirety of their [nuclear] program is to the sites that might get bombed. We don't know what else they may have created – redundancies, duplicates, et cetera – or how long it might take for them to reconstitute the program after they've been bombed. But it's very clear that the Iranians are far more advanced than they were in 2013. They're a matter of weeks away from having enough fissile material for five, six, seven bombs.
If the talks are successful, the Iranians would have to agree to dilute or send out a lot of that material that they would use for 90% enrichment, which is bomb-grade enrichment. They would have to basically give that all up. They would have to agree not to enrich beyond 5%. They would have to agree to be monitored very aggressively by the International Atomic Energy Agency. They would have to agree to give up a lot of their infrastructure like they did last time — take down cascades of advanced centrifuges, put them in warehouses under the lock and key of the IAEA.
I am hopeful because I think the Iranians need the deal. They don't want war. They need economic relief. And I think President Trump needs this deal. He doesn't want war. And actually at this moment in time, his other major foreign policy initiatives, the Gaza ceasefire and the Ukraine-Russia ceasefire, are not going anywhere. The war has resumed in Gaza. And the Ukraine-Russia peace process is proving much more difficult and fraught than it was assumed. So in fact, the best news he had all week to tell the media was that the talks in Oman went very well.
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Don't expect the Iranians to cave. They're in a very weak position right now, but the words that have been coming out from the Iranian side have been “respect,” “dignity,” “equality.” Their expectations of the meeting were to be treated with some respect and some dignity. And they got that as a minimum bar for entry and for a follow-on meeting. The good news about the meeting is that no matter what the content was, no matter what was exchanged in terms of the Omanis running messages from one room to the other, we got a second meeting. So there is enough to work with and that's promising enough. The sides are super far apart, but talking is better than not talking.
Weaponization is different from having a nuclear energy program or a nuclear medicine program. The president made clear before this round of meetings that this was about weaponization. And for those of us who watch nuclear issues, that's a super important distinction. Netanyahu's distinction has been total destruction, a la Libya. I believe that the daylight on this issue was between the United States and Israel. It is not between Iran and the beginnings of the United States discussions on the weapons program.
What we're hearing from [Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas] Araghchi is that the talks are to be narrowly focused on nuclear, in exchange for sanctions relief. For Iran, this was the classic playbook from 2015, and 2014. [Araghchi] was on the negotiating team then, leading the negotiations from time to time – very credible and very successful, keeping the U.S. and the EU and the parties to the JCPOA negotiations focused as narrowly as possible on the weapons program. And so I think we're right back where we were in 2015. They're going to play the same playbook that they played in 2014 and 15. That's what I'm hearing right now. I'm seeing replay tapes in my head.
There are certain things that would have to be put in the parking lot for discussion – to include the enriched uranium, the stockpiles, where they are, the numbers of centrifuges, the types of centrifuges, the supply of hexafluoride. Where is everything? Each facility? Don't hide things, like [the Iranians] are good at. But don't forget also on the weapons side, there is the delivery capability. When you define weaponization, it is also delivery systems, in my book. And we've talked about the real threat to the region, the threat to the United States, the threat to Israel, the threat to NATO are [Iran’s] longer-range missiles. At [Araghchi’s] press conference after the session in Muscat, you didn't hear him say anything about missiles, missile complexes. On this particular topic, I think there's a lot of shaping and molding and opportunity for both sides to say, let's define the term “weaponization. And our definition, I believe, should include the missile delivery systems.
Iran wiggled their way through that [in the 2015 deal.] With love in my heart for the Iranian people, the government was very good at wiggling their way through a very complicated process with a lot of international players and saying, if we're going to expand this thing too broadly, we'll never get there. And so it was a very narrow agreement, which left Iran with way too much capacity and capability, which is why we are where we are today.
[Iran’s relative weakness is] exceptionally important. And that's why the words dignity, respect, and equality come out of Iran's mouth when [Araghchi] talks. He can't really sit down and have a thoughtful conversation with the United States if the concern is that we won't treat Iran as a partner in the negotiation, if we're only going to dictate. And I think obviously we must have gotten through that, because there's a follow-on meeting.
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Both sides have described these exchanges in Muscat as constructive. We have to wait and see what that means, because obviously you need an agreement to be able to justify such euphoria and positive early feedback.
In terms of the bottom line, neither the United States nor Iran is interested in letting these tensions surrounding Iran's nuclear program blow up in the shape of a military conflict. That is the last thing President Trump wants to see. He's a politician; his entire career has been one of warning against these open-ended costly wars in the Middle East. For him to end up in one of those wars would be essentially a personal and a political failure. So I think he's very reluctant to take action against Iran militarily. And yet, as he has put it, he does not want to see Iranian nuclear weapons. So that's his red line.
The Iranians do not want to see the United States Air Force flying over Iran's skies and hitting massive amounts of targets because that would set not just their economy at risk, but the survival of the regime could be put at risk. So the bottom line is, neither side wants conflict.
I do see a pathway [to a deal.] We have to remember: Iran's nuclear program was revealed to the world back in 2002. And throughout that period, there have been multiple rounds of the world being on the brink of war between the U.S. and Iran. And it happens the same way– the U.S. puts troops closer to Iran, Iran threatens to weaponize its nuclear program, and then nothing happens.
Those of us who are hopeful, those of us who really think a new war in the Middle East would be to the detriment of international security, we have to take a step back. The question of diplomacy working or not is really about expectations. President Trump, I think he single handedly shapes the U.S. position on this, so I would not be looking to folks like Marco Rubio or Mike Waltz and others to shape his mindset on this issue. It's one man and his envoy, Steven Witkoff, who are essentially the ones that matter. President Trump's bottom line is: no Iranian nuclear weapon.
On the Iranian side, you have Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei who has come out and said he doesn't want to have a nuclear weapon, but he doesn't want to give up the civilian nuclear program. If that's the case, both of them agree there shouldn't be Iranian nuclear weapons. So the question is, how do you monitor Iran's nuclear civilian program? And we already have a template, it goes back to 2015. Most of the heavy lifting was done 10 years ago.
Now of course, we know Iran's program is very different today. It's expanded massively, but the same template exists in terms of rolling it back. It's a question of reducing the number of centrifuges, Iran enriching no more than a certain percentage and so forth. So it's doable if it's limited to only the nuclear issue. That's the big question. Will the U.S. ask for other concessions from Iran? Will the Iranians ask for something different than they did in 2015? If that's the case, would it complicate talks or not? We have to wait and see.
Iran is on the defensive. In 2015, Iran's ultimate demand and hope was to get sanctions lifted. What is the big demand of 2025? It's to avoid war. They're very different. Sanctions relief is what you hope for. War is what you're desperately trying to avoid. So yes, Iran from that point of view is on the defensive.
There are folks who are writing commentary after commentary saying Iran is on the defensive, therefore you should ask, for example, for the Libya model, meaning Iran gives up its entire nuclear program. Or you ask that Iran publicly comes out and denounces all its past support for Hezbollah or the Houthis and so forth. That's where I say, well yes, they're weak, but if you're asking for outright capitulation for them to come out in public with the white flag and say, we're sorry, we've been wrong for the last half a century, that's not going to happen. That's how you end up in a war situation.
You can get a lot more out of this Iranian regime if you don't publicly humiliate them. The one lesson we learned from the 2015 nuclear deal is that a nuclear agreement between Washington and Tehran alone is not going to fix the bad blood going back to 1979. As broadly as possible, Iran needs to open itself up for talks with the Trump administration. And here is an American president who is reluctant to go to war in the Middle East, who has basically no grand strategy, and is not going to focus on regime change. So the Iranian authorities back in Tehran have a moment here to turn the page and broaden the conversation with the United States, talk about other issues that the U.S. cares about, because if they do that, then the probability that any new nuclear agreement can survive, unlike the 2015 one, will be that much greater.
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