What Does Trump Want from Iran?

By Noah Rothman

Happy Wednesday! Noah Rothman here, filling in for the irreplaceable Jim Geraghty. You’ll find Dominic Pino taking the reins of the Morning Jolt again tomorrow, but you can look forward to a reprieve from us at the end of the week when we allow you to enjoy your Good Friday in peace.

On the menu today: The Trump administration’s full-court press for a new Iran nuclear deal.

A High Stakes Gamble

Last week, seated alongside Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, President Donald Trump revealed that the U.S. would engage in “direct talks with Iran” over the future of its nuclear program.

The announcement gave way to speculation. Surely, the president didn’t mean “direct” in the literal sense. He was probably searching for a descriptive adjective that would lend gravity to the initiative. Presumably, the U.S. would only communicate with Tehran via neutral intermediaries. Right?

Wrong! Last weekend, Trump’s all-purpose conflict negotiator, Steve Witkoff, met directly with the Islamic Republic’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi. They were seen conversing outside the Omani venue where the U.S. and Iran are engaged in (supposedly) indirect negotiations over the country’s nuclear program. Subsequent reporting by Axios’s Barak Ravid revealed that the two figures spent the better part of an hour in direct talks — “longer than was revealed publicly,” he said.

The first round of discussions has been described as productive by their participants, including Iran’s supreme leader. A second round of negotiations is tentatively slated to take place this weekend. The outstanding question remains: What are these talks designed to achieve? That depends on whom you ask.

If you’re asking the Iranians, their goal is to secure an interim agreement with the U.S. that maybe compels it to limit its uranium enrichment program or even dilute some of its stockpiles of 60 percent highly enriched uranium (HEU). In exchange for that and the restoration of a United Nations-monitored inspections regime, Iran would like to see the U.S. pare back economic sanctions and relieve the legal, economic, and military pressure on its various terrorist proxies. At the very least, Tehran hopes that its consent to a provisional nuclear deal would spare its nuclear enrichment facilities from aerial bombardment.

So, what does the U.S. side of this equation want? That is a moving target.

In a conversation with Fox News Channel host Sean Hannity on Monday night, Witkoff said that negotiations with the Iranians will be focused on securing limits on uranium enrichment levels. “This is going to be much about verification on the enrichment program,” he added, “and then ultimately verification on weaponization. That includes missiles, the type of missiles that they have stockpiled there, and it includes the trigger for a bomb.”

It’s not at all clear what he meant by “trigger for a bomb,” but the rest is comprehensible. Witkoff envisioned capping Iranian enrichment capacity at 3.67 percent — e.g., the level required for civilian nuclear reactors. That is, in principle, in line with the terms Barack Obama ironed out with Iran ahead of what became the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), a.k.a. the 2015 “Iran nuclear deal.” Republicans (including Donald Trump) objected to those terms at the time because the same advanced centrifuges that can enrich uranium to 3.67 percent can enrich it to weapons-grade — it’s just a function of time. As Barack Obama admitted, when the JCPOA was scheduled to sunset, Iran would “have advanced centrifuges that can enrich uranium fairly rapidly, and at that point the breakout times would have shrunk almost down to zero.”

As for Witkoff’s preferred verification regime, America’s brief experiment with the JCPOA provides more lessons on what the U.S. should seek to avoid.

In his 2017 testimony before a House subcommittee, Institute for Science and International Security president David Albright illustrated the extent of Iran’s duplicity. In violation of the deal’s terms, he observed, Iran had maintained its centrifuge development program, continued to illicitly import centrifuge components and natural-uranium imports, enriched uranium beyond the limits codified in the deal, and denied inspectors access to key sites. And that’s when Iran wasn’t taking U.S. sailors hostage and humiliating them on camera in a display of contempt both for the Obama administration and the Geneva Conventions (not that the Obama White House cared). All this occurred under the U.N.’s nose, which explains why Iran would welcome the return of its inspectors.

What Are We Doing Here?

Witkoff’s comments to Hannity seemed to ruffle all the wrong feathers. In a clarifying walk back, Trump’s negotiator insisted that a “deal with Iran will only be completed if it is a Trump deal.” By “Trump deal,” we can assume the president’s delegate means a “good deal.” So, what would a good deal entail? According to Witkoff’s recantation, that now means “a framework for peace, stability, and prosperity in the Middle East — meaning that Iran must stop and eliminate its nuclear enrichment and weaponization program.” Glad that’s all cleared up.

On reflection, it’s unsurprising that a negotiator who deferred to Joe Biden’s framework in negotiations with Hamas would also rely on Obama’s diplomatic architecture in talks with Iran. Yet, Witkoff’s confusion exposes divisions within the administration over what the goal of this diplomatic offensive should be.

According to Ravid’s sources, multiple perspectives were presented to the president during a high-level meeting this week between Trump and his subordinates. Vice President JD “Vance and Witkoff think diplomacy could lead to a nuclear deal and think the U.S. should be ready to make some compromises in order to get it,” the Axios reporter revealed. “Other senior members of the administration, including [Marco] Rubio and [Mike] Waltz, are highly skeptical and support a maximalist approach to the negotiations.” Trump, however, is “sending mixed messages.”

The president does seem to be of two minds when it comes to neutralizing the Iranian nuclear threat. On the one hand, his administration’s diplomatic overtures to Iran are certainly real and substantive. On the other, Trump’s dispatch of two carrier groups to the region as well as a fleet of B-2 stealth bombers, C-17 transport aircraft, and KC-135 refueling tankers to the U.S. base at Diego Garcia suggest the president is just as seriously contemplating a forceful resolution to the impasse.

If the president and his team can settle on a narrow goal for these talks, the administration has reason to believe they will be fruitful. The Iranian regime is on the backfoot. It’s terrorist proxies Hamas and Hezbollah are decimated. The Houthi rebels in Yemen are being steadily degraded by unrelenting U.S. airstrikes. With the flight of Bashar al-Assad to Russia, Iran’s suzerainty over Syria is no more. On the domestic front, the rising cost of food and the weakening Iranian rial — conditions exacerbated by the West’s sanctions regime — have contributed to anti-regime sentiment inside Iran. Given these inducements, the mullahs may be willing to bend. At least, that’s what John Kerry thinks.

“While some would argue this is a time to focus narrowly on a new nuclear agreement, we believe broader possibilities are achievable,” the former secretary of state wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed alongside his co-author, investment fund CEO Thomas Kaplan. “A new deal could and should go much further than previous negotiations allowed.” Kerry envisions a civilian threshold limit on uranium enrichment, and “end” to buried nuclear sites, a robust inspections regime, the “termination of its sponsorship” of terrorist elements, and the “circumscription” of its ballistic missile program.

Save Kerry’s preferred the HEU limits that Tehran could easily reverse and a U.N.-backed inspections regime it could circumvent, Iran won’t agree to Kerry’s scheme. The Iranian newspaper Javan, a reliable regime mouthpiece, has ruled out the prospect of a deal that limits Iran’s ability to produce ballistic missiles. Still, outlets across the Iranian media spectrum, even those outlets that cater to hardline elements, are sounding notes of openness to an arrangement with the Trump administration. The regime is over a barrel, and it believes Trump is offering it a reprieve. Tehran will make the most of it up and until the point at which it believes it has no choice but to give up its offensive weapons programs. The regime insists that its right to enrich uranium is “non-negotiable,” and we have every reason to assume it means it.

That’s why skeptics of this process are right to worry that Iran is stalling for time. Indeed, the negotiations could actively undermine U.S. objectives in the region. As RANE Network analyst Ryan Bohl speculated, “negotiations that would forestall military action” are certainly in the regime’s interest. So, too, is the prospect that talks could signal to foreign investors that the Iranian market is once again open for business, “which would in turn improve public support for the Islamic Republic.”

U.S. Deputy Special Envoy to the Middle East Morgan Ortagus is aware of this dynamic. “We’re not going to get in the Biden trap,” she recently said of the degree to which the Iranians were “just stringing us along” for much of the last administration. “If we’re going to have talks, they need to be quick,” she continued.

If talks fail and military action is the last alternative, the administration’s good faith attempt to resolve the Iranian nuclear crisis peacefully might afford it some good will abroad. These negotiations could just as easily produce an unsatisfactory framework that fails to satisfy either party. That assumes the talks don’t simply collapse.

If this process culminates on strikes on Iran’s nuclear program anyway, Tehran will insist that it strove for peace but could not overcome the Trump administration’s myopic bloodlust. In that circumstance, cynics and skeptics of America’s motives — a ballooning contingent overseas in these last few tumultuous weeks — will be all too eager to take the Islamic Republic’s line at face value.

The administration is engaged in a high stakes gambit from which one of two outcomes is likeliest to result: Either these negotiations will serve as the predicate for a significant and fraught military action against Iran’s nuclear program, or they will produce another Obama-style Iran nuclear deal that only forestalls Tehran’s race to a bomb while lending Western legitimacy to its missile program and sponsorship of terrorism. Neither outcome is ideal, but no one said geopolitics was easy.

Addendum: Meanwhile, the administration’s diplomatic offensive has not been well received even in quarters that are typically deferential to the president:

If Ravid’s reporting is accurate, we know who is advising the president to resurrect the JCPOA. They are the same people who are inclined to throw Ukraine under the bus and sought a Gaza cease-fire that would have secured Hamas’s role as the preeminent political and military force on the Strip. It’s the same contingent that is deeply skeptical of America’s global hegemonic obligations, and they’ve been spoiling for fights with the few remaining conservative internationalists within Trump’s orbit.

The divisions within the MAGA firmament over America’s role in the world are vast and irreconcilable. That tension has been muted since Donald Trump’s election because the universal impulse on the right to defer to the president’s wisdom has bridged this divide. That was never going to last. Intra-GOP politics was bound to make a comeback eventually. The incipient prospect of a new Iran nuclear deal seems to have hastened the onset of that conflict.

Noah Rothmanis a senior writer atNational Review. He is the author ofThe Rise of the New Puritans: Fighting Back against Progressives’ War on FunandUnjust: Social Justice and the Unmaking of America.@NoahCRothman