In May 2018,Donald Trumpunilaterally withdrew the US from the Iran nuclear deal and reimposed American sanctions that crippled the Iranian economy. Trump tore up the 2015 agreement, which had taken years for Iran to negotiate with six world powers, under which Tehran limited its nuclear program in exchange for relief from international sanctions. Trump insisted he would be able to negotiate a better pact than the one reached by Barack Obama’s administration.
Today, in his second term as president, Trump is eager to fix theIrandeal he broke nearly seven years ago.
While Trump’s overall foreign policy has been chaotic and has alienated traditional US allies in Europe and elsewhere, he has an opportunity to reach an agreement with Iran that eluded Joe Biden. Since Trump walked away from the original deal, Iran has moved closer to having a nuclear weapon than it has ever been. It has enriched enough uranium close to weapons-grade quality tomake six nuclear bombs, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). But analysts believe that even after enriching enough uranium for a bomb, Iran would still need up to a year to developan actual nuclear warheadthat could be deployed on a ballistic missile.
Last month, Trump sent a letter to Iran’s supreme leader, the 86-year-old Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, saying the US wanted to negotiate a new deal. Trump followed up with apublic threat, saying if Iran’s leaders did not agree to renewed talks, they would be subjected to “bombing the likes of which they have never seen before”. After Trump’s threats and abuildup of US forcesin the Middle East, Iran’s military saidit would respond to any attack by targeting US bases in the region, which house thousands of American troops.
But Iranian leaders also agreed toindirect negotiations, rather than the direct talks Trump had proposed. Trump dispatched his special envoy, the real estate developer Steve Witkoff, to lead a team of US negotiators to meet indirectly with top Iranian officials, including the foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi. The two sides held two rounds of productive talks so far this month, under the mediation of Oman. And the US and Iranian teams aredue to meet againthis weekend in Muscat, the capital of Oman, where they will start talks on technical details of a potential agreement.
While Trump and Iran’s leaders both changed their tones in recent weeks, there are many obstacles before a deal can be reached, including hardliners in Iran and Washington, as well as opposition from Israel’s rightwing government, led by Benjamin Netanyahu, who has spent years working toundermine negotiationsbetween the US and Iran. The main barrier will be whether the Trump administration insists on a total dismantling of Iran’s nuclear program – the so-called “Libya model”, named after the late Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi, who decided to eliminate his country’s nuclear weapons program in 2003 under pressure from the US. But that decision deprived Gaddafi of a major lever to stave off western military intervention after the Arab Spring uprisings in 2011, which led to his regime’s fall and his killing by Libyan rebels.
Some foreign policy hawks in Washington, including Trump’s national security adviser, Michael Waltz, and the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, insist on this maximalist strategy, which echoes Netanyahu’s demand thatIran must completely dismantleits nuclear enrichment activity and infrastructure as part of any deal with the US. If Trump takes a similar approach, negotiations would probably break down and Trump could follow through on his threat to carry out military strikes.
Iran has made clear that it will not agree to the total end of its nuclear program, but would accept a verification-based approach, as it did under the 2015 deal negotiated by the Obama administration along with China, France, Russia, the UK and Germany, together with the European Union. That type of agreement would place strict limits on Iran’s ability to enrich uranium and impose an inspections regime involving international monitors. Several of Trump’s advisers, including Witkoff and the vice-president, JD Vance, seem to favor this solution.
“I think he wants to deal with Iran with respect,”Witkoff said of Trump’s outreachto the Iranian regime, in a long interview last month with Tucker Carlson, the rightwing media host who has been highly critical of Republican hawks agitating for war with Iran. “He wants to build trust with them, if it’s possible.”
Iran’s leaders apparently got that message – and have tried to stroke Trump’s ego and convey that they respect him in ways they never respected Biden. In aWashington Post op-edpublished on 8 April, Iran’s foreign minister seemed to be speaking to Trump directly when he blamed the failure of earlier negotiations on a “lack of real determination by the Biden administration”. Araghchi also played to Trump’s oft-repeated desire to be a peacemaker who ends America’s legacy of forever wars, writing: “We cannot imagine President Trump wanting to become another US president mired in a catastrophic war in the Middle East.”
And the minister appealed to Trump’s reputation as a deal-maker, citing the “trillion-dollar opportunity” that would benefit US companies if they could gain access to Iran after a diplomatic agreement. Iran’s leaders evidently understand that Trump loves to frame his foreign policy as being guided by his desire to secure economic deals and benefits for American businesses.
In this case, Trump’s transactional instincts and bulldozer style of negotiations could lead to a positive outcome, avoiding war with Iran and undermining the hardliners in Washington, Iran and Israel. Trump has already adopted a significant shift toward Tehran from his first term, when he had insisted that Iran was the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism and the greatest threat to US interests in the Middle East.
After he took office in 2017, Trump wanted to tear up the Iran deal partly because it was one of Obama’s major foreign policy accomplishments. Trump also surrounded himself with hawkish advisers who reinforced the danger of an Iranian threat, including HR McMaster, who served as national security adviser, and James Mattis, who was defense secretary. Both men commanded US troops during the occupation of Iraq, and they fought Iraqi militias funded by Iran. Trump later appointed John Bolton, another neoconservative and advocate of the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, as his national security adviser.
In his second term, Trump has banished most of the neocons from his administration. Trump also seems to realize that Netanyahu could become one of the biggest obstacles to an Iran deal, as he was during the Obama and Biden administrations. It was no accident that the president announcedhis plan for renewed talkswith Iran while Netanyahu sat beside him at an Oval Office meeting on 7 April. Netanyahu had arranged a hasty visit to Washington to seek an exemption from Trump on new tariffs on Israeli exports. Buthe left empty-handedand embarrassed by Trump’s Iran announcement. That meeting was a signal to Iran’s leaders: that Trump would not allow Netanyahu to steamroll him, as the Israeli premier had done with other US presidents.
If Trump continues to resist Netanyahu, along with hawkish Republicans and some of his own advisers, he might well be able to negotiate a dramatic deal with Iran – and repair the nuclear crisis he unleashed years ago.
Mohamad Bazzi is the director of the Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern studies and a journalism professor at New York University.