The Tough Choice Facing Trump in the Iran Nuclear Talks

The dead end between President Trump’s negotiation team and Iran comes down to this: if the United States is willing to risk allowing Iran to continue to produce nuclear fuel if the alternative is not an agreement and the possibility of another war in the Middle East.

To Mr. Trump and his special envoy, Steve Witkoff, negotiations with Iran are a new experience, and the insistence of Iran to never give in his ability to enrich uranium on his soil threatens to scuttle an agreement that the president a few weeks ago with confidence was at hand.

But it is almost exactly the same annoying dilemma that President Barack Obama was confronted a decade ago. Contrecue, Mr. Obama and his assistants concluded that the only way to an agreement allowed Iran to continue to produce small quantities of nuclear fuel, keeping its nuclear centrifuges which turn and its scientists working.

The agreement – an agreement against which each Republican in the Congress voted, with certain Democrats – contained Iran’s ambitions for three years until Mr. Trump withdrew. Iran was in accordance with the terms of the agreement.

Mr. Trump is now mainly faced with the same choices that confronted his first predecessor. And, like Mr. Obama, he faces a probable opposition from the two Iranian hawks in the United States and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, who appeared before a joint session of the Congress ten years ago and urged the legislators to reject the agreement that Mr. Obama had negotiated. In recent months, Netanyahu has been pressure for a preventive strike on Iranian nuclear sites.

“There is a bit of already seen here,” said Wendy Sherman, who was the chief negotiator of the 2015 agreement for the Obama administration. “There are clearly American senators, members of the congress and Israeli officials who insist on the complete dismantling of Iranian installations and zero enrichment. We faced the same challenges. ”

She said that she wanted Mr. Witkoff, noting that he had recently said that in Iran negotiations, as in New York real estate offers, it was important to understand what everyone was looking for and giving them the impression of having something.

“He has a difficult task,” said Sherman, who was then assistant secretary of state.

But Iranian officials, she noted, “were very clear that they need to enrich, and not only in tiny quantities. And I doubt that they will move away from this position. ” She noted that Mr. Trump had available tools that Mr. Obama did not, including a conforming congress and more latitude to lift embargoes in Iran.

Trump seemed to recognize on Monday that negotiations had taken a difficult turn. “They just ask for things you can’t do,” said Trump on Monday, seeming to be frustrated. “They don’t want to abandon what they have to give up. You know what it is: they are looking for an enrichment. ”

Iran says that he did not officially respond to Mr. Trump and Mr. Witkoff, who had designed what he hoped to be an innovative compromise. According to its proposal, Iran would be authorized to continue to enrich at low levels for several years, until a consortium is formed which would provide nuclear fuel to power plants around the Middle East.

Consortium fuel production will take place somewhere in the region. Under the American proposal, production could not take place on Iranian territory. For years, other proposals have been launched to move production to Persian Gulf Islands, where the facilities would be built above the ground and could be more easily monitored – or destroyed.

As he would probably have taken years, perhaps a decade, to put the operational consortium, Mr. Witkoff considered the proposal as a graceful means for everyone to declare a victory. Iran could say that it was enriching in the predictable future. Trump could say that he got something that Mr. Obama did not make: an commitment to end the enrichment.

So far, it has not worked. Iranian officials said they were open to the idea of ​​a consortium as long as it is on Iranian soil.

The supreme leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, rejected the idea as a Western ruse to leave Tehran from the nuclear fuel company. But Mr. Witkoff and Iranian negotiators include the risk of letting negotiations collapse: Netanyahu could seize the failure to renew his campaign to take military measures.

As none want to risk a war, the two parties avoid declarations that negotiations are in a dead end. The negotiators meet this weekend in Oman, who acts as a mediator.

Nobody talks about blockages. Trump, who asked in a letter in early April to the Supreme Chief that an agreement should be concluded in two months, no longer discusses deadlines.

Majid Takht-Ravanchi, Vice-Minister of Foreign Affairs and the first nuclear negotiator, said in an hour-long video interview with Irna, the state news agency, regardless of the duration of the negotiations, “one point is certain, and it is that the enrichment must take place in Iran”. He added: “It’s our red line.”

This leaves Trump in a difficult situation, concede the representatives of the government. The Iranian threat is greater than ten years ago: the country has now produced so much fuel at quasi-bomb levels that it could produce fuel for 10 nuclear weapons in a short time. (Transforming them into an operating weapon would take more months, perhaps a year, say the experts.)

And the fact that Iran The air defenses were compromised in an Israeli missile attack in October led Mr. Netanyahu to affirm that there has never been a better opportunity to attack the country’s nuclear sites, even if Israel has no weapons necessary to go to the deepest production sites. The Supreme National Security Council of Iran said in a statement on Monday that it would retaliate with strikes on Israeli nuclear installations if Israel attacked Iranian nuclear sites.

“The most sensitive sites are half a million underground,” said Rafael Grossi recently, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, which inspects Iranian nuclear installations, noting that he had visited the site.

Mr. Trump, Mr. Witkoff, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and the military leaders met at Camp David on Sunday evening, would have debated diplomatic and military options. It is not clear what conclusions they fired, if necessary.

The next morning, still for president, Trump spoke to Mr. Netanyahu, in part to keep him informed, but above all, said an official, to make sure that he did not upset negotiations by threatening an imminent military action.

This conversation was only the last of an increasingly tense relationship between Mr. Trump and Mr. Netanyahu. The Israeli Prime Minister, according to his associates, was surprised to see how Mr. Trump insisted to probe a diplomatic solution.

The abolition of Michael Waltz as a national security advisor to Mr. Trump was widely considered in Washington as motivated, in part, by traditional and rich traditional opinions of Mr. Waltz on Iran, which were the norm in the republican party during Mr. Trump’s first mandate.

In fact, Mr. Trump’s own party is now divided between the Hawks insisting on the complete dismantling of Iranian infrastructure and a more isolationist camp which says that the most important thing is to avoid sucking the United States in another war in the Middle East.

So far, Mr. Trump and his closest assistance have danced between these two camps.

And the inspectors say that Iranian nuclear centrifuges run as quickly as ever, giving the country more fuel that could be used to build a weapon – or be exchanged in an agreement.