For two months now, the Iran war has dominated headlines. But now that there’s a cease-fire, the focus has shifted from the battlefield to the negotiating table.
It turns out Trump-style diplomacy is a lot like Trump-style war. It involves a lot of gut instinct and mixed messages, often delivered in ALL CAPS. It also involves a lot of U-turns — like this weekend, when Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner were going to Pakistan, up until the moment that they weren’t.
It’s not always easy to follow the various plot twists. But there’s one useful benchmark to evaluate whether this war ultimately produces a good result for the United States: Whatever agreement Trump reaches with Iran, will it improve on the nuclear deal he walked away from in 2018? Today I’m writing on why that may be difficult.
The challenges of reaching a ‘FAR BETTER’ deal with Iran
The last time the United States successfully reached an agreement with Iran, it took almost two years, scores of meetings and an army of diplomats, nuclear experts and C.I.A. agents, both at the negotiating table and at home.
That was 11 years ago, when President Obama signed the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or J.C.P.O.A. It ran 160 pages long, included five technical annexes detailing the limits on Iran’s nuclear program and largely delivered on what it promised.
This is the deal Trump ripped up in 2018. He’s now promising something “FAR BETTER.” But he’s doing so with negotiators much less steeped in the subject matter, at a time when Iran has discovered a powerful new source of leverage in the Strait of Hormuz and Trump himself is under time pressure to end the war and its disastrous effects on gas prices before midterm elections in the fall.
The decision to scrap Obama’s nuclear deal prompted Iran to enrich at much higher levels, arguably setting the world on a path toward the current war. Trump knows the results of that war will be judged by whatever agreement comes next. But improving on the Obama agreement at this point is a daunting task.
That may be one reason negotiations have stalled before they’ve even really begun.
The devil is in the details
I spoke to David Sanger, our White House and national security correspondent who covered the J.C.P.O.A. negotiations. That agreement had one main objective: keep Iran at least one year from being able to build a nuclear bomb.
To this end, it obliged Iran to agree to three main conditions in return for sanctions relief:
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Ship 97 percent of its nuclear material out of the country, leaving it with less than what was needed to make a bomb.
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Limit any ongoing enrichment of uranium to 3.67 percent, which is reactor fuel level — well below bomb-grade.
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Adhere to an intrusive inspection regimen conducted by the International Atomic Energy Agency.
The test now is whether Trump can do better than that in very different circumstances and with a very different negotiating team.
Obama’s chief negotiator always came to the table with a large posse of experts. The C.I.A.’s top Iran expert was often in the room. So was the energy secretary, an expert in nuclear weapons design.
Trump’s team does not have an entourage of experts. The main people involved in the limited negotiations so far have been Vice President JD Vance; Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner; and his special envoy, Steve Witkoff. The latter two learned their deal-making skills in New York real estate.
The man who is currently Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, was deputy negotiator at the time of the J.C.P.O.A. negotiations. David recalled how intimately familiar he was with Iran’s nuclear program.
“He knew every inch of it,” David told me. “Witkoff and Kushner are smart people and quick learners, but they’re relatively new to this. The Iranian team has a depth of expertise.”
Iran also holds better cards now than it did at the time. Its control over the Strait of Hormuz means it will resist giving up more than it might have before the war, Erika Solomon, our Iran bureau chief, told me.
The Iranians have already rejected the two central U.S. demands that would have been improvements on the previous deal: They’ve refused to hand over their nuclear stockpile and suspend enrichment indefinitely.
For now, following two rounds of aborted talks, the big question is whether and when the two sides will meet again.
100 nuclear weapons
The J.C.P.O.A. did fall short: It failed to put a limit on Iran’s missile capability. It did not stop Iran from funding its proxies. It also would have expired in 2030.
It was these shortfalls that Trump latched onto when he pulled the U.S. out, calling it a “guaranteed Road to a Nuclear Weapon.”
But it was after the U.S. left that deal that Iran ramped up its enrichment levels. At the time the U.S. pulled out, Iran’s weapon designers had too little nuclear fuel to build a single bomb — they’d shipped almost all of it to Russia, in accordance with the deal’s requirements.
Today, according to international inspectors, Iran not only has half a ton of near-bomb-grade uranium buried under the rubble of last year’s U.S. strikes. It also has a total of 11 tons of uranium, at various enrichment levels. With further purification, David writes, “that is enough to build up to 100 nuclear weapons.”
Iran enriched virtually all that uranium in the years after Trump abandoned Obama’s deal.
Other developments in the war:
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