President Trump said on Monday that the United States would engage in “direct” negotiations with Iran next Saturday in a last effort to curb the country’s nuclear program, saying Téhéran would be “in great danger” if it would not reach an agreement.
If direct talks take place, they would be the first official negotiations face to face between the two countries since Mr. Trump abandoned the nuclear agreement of the Obama era seven years ago. They would also come at a perilous moment, because Iran lost the air defenses around its main nuclear sites due to precise Israeli strikes last October. And Iran can no longer rely on its proxy forces in the Middle East – Hamas, Hezbollah and the Assad government, now inaugurated in Syria – to threaten Israel with reprisals.
In a position of social media, the Iranian Minister of Foreign Affairs, Abbas Araghchi, confirmed that the talks would take place on Saturday in Oman – but he said that they would be indirect, which means that the intermediaries would work with the two parties. “It is as much an opportunity as a test. The ball is in the American courtyard,” said Araghchi.
On the order of its supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran refused to sit with American officials in direct nuclear negotiations since Trump retired from the last agreement. However, after Trump spoke on Monday, three Iranian officials said that Ayatollah Khamenei had moved to potentially direct talks.
The officials said that if the indirect talks on Saturday were respectful and productive, direct talks can occur. The officials asked not to be appointed because they were not allowed to speak publicly.
However, Iran is almost certain to resist the dismantling of all its nuclear infrastructure, which gave it a “threshold” capacity to make fuel for a bomb in a few weeks – and perhaps a full weapon in months. Many Iranians began to speak openly about the need for the country to build a weapon because it has proven to be defenseless in a series of missile exchanges with Israel last year.
Sitting next to Mr. Trump on Monday during a visit to the United States, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu insisted that any resulting agreement must follow what he called the “Libya model”, which means that Iran should dismantle and send out of the country all its nuclear infrastructure. But a large part of Libya’s nuclear enrichment equipment had never been suspended before being handed over to the United States in 2003; Iranian nuclear infrastructure has been operating for decades and spreads across the country, a large part of the underground.
Netanyahu was strangely silent during a long session of questions and answers with journalists, a lively contrast with his last visit to Washington, two months ago. After a few introductory remarks, he was largely a spectator while Mr. Trump mired against the European nations who, according to him, had “screwed up” the United States and threatened even more punishing prices against China unless he has informed his threat of reprisal prices on Tuesday. It also scrambled the waters as to its tariff structure was intended to be a permanent source of American income or simply to take advantage of the negotiations.
Netanyahu left the Oval Office without a public commitment from Mr. Trump to eliminate the 17% rate he had placed on Israel, one of the nearest American allies. Obtaining such a commitment had been one of the key objectives of his trip, as well as securing weapons even more for the war against Hamas in Gaza and for Israeli military action in the West Bank. If the two men discussed Israeli Israeli-American military options or joint with the main Iranian nuclear sites, they gave no indication of having done it during their public comments.
The closest Mr. Trump had come to say: “I think everyone agrees that making an agreement would be preferable to make the evidence. And the evidence is not something with which I want to get involved, or frankly that Israel wants to be involved, if they can avoid it.” Again, Mr. Netanyahu said nothing, as Mr. Trump, voluble and dominant, barely let him make a word.
Mr. Trump added: “So we will see if we can avoid it, but it becomes a very dangerous territory, and I hope that these talks will succeed.”
Mr. Trump solves, to a certain extent, a problem of his own manufacture. The 2015 nuclear agreement led to Iran’s shipment to the country 97% of its enriched uranium, leaving small quantities in the country and the equipment necessary to produce nuclear fuel. President Barack Obama and his best collaborators said at the time that the agreement was the best they could extract. But that left Iran with the equipment and the know-how to rebuild after Mr. Trump withdrew from the agreement, and today he has enough fuel to produce more than six nuclear weapons in relatively short time.
How long it would take a question of dispute: the New York Times reported in early February that new information indicated that a secret team of Iranian scientists explored a faster and more crude approach to develop an atomic weapon. Trump has probably been informed since these conclusions, which came at the end of the Biden administration, and they added emergency to talks. Administration officials say they will not engage in prolonged negotiations with Tehran.
Trump’s surprise announcement of what he called a “high -level” meeting on Monday exploded in the Iranian media. Some Iranians have reacted with enthusiasm, claiming on social networks that they hoped that negotiations were solving their economic problems and would avoid the threat of war, which has become acute in recent months.
“The way we see it, Trump’s comments on negotiations were a clear and strong signal for Israel and Iran,” said Mehdi Rahmati, a conservative political analyst close to the government, in a Tehran telephone interview. “He puts the brakes on the plan of Israel for military strikes and openly sends a positive impulse to Iran that he promotes diplomacy and wants to solve our problems.”
Earlier in the day, the spokesman for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Esmeil Bagheri, told Iranian media: “The Iranian offer for indirect negotiations was a generous and wise offer, given the history of the issue and trends related to nuclear negotiations in the last decade. We focus on what we offer. ”
The fact that Iran arrives at the table seems to be recognition of its largely weakened state. Its nuclear installations have never been so vulnerable. And in addition to hitting Iran’s air defenses in October, Israel has also destroyed missile production facilities where Iran mixes fuel fuel. Iran’s ability to produce new missiles has therefore been temporarily limited.
But it is quite possible, say nuclear experts that the maximum that Iran considers that it can give will be far from the request that Mr. Trump’s national security advisor, Michael Waltz, spoke: the complete dismantling of his nuclear installations.
This would mean an end to Natanz’s nuclear enrichment site, which the United States and Israel attacked with the Cyber Armenet Staxnet 15 years ago, and that Israel has sabotaged episitical since. This would mean destroying the Fordows enrichment site, deeply under a mountain at a military base. And that would mean dismantling a range of other facilities, distributed across the country, under the eye of international negotiators.
If Mr. Trump does not reach complete dismantling, he will be forced to face questions to find out if he obtained more than the Obama administration a decade ago. Trump rejected this agreement as a “disaster” and embarrassment, noting that this would increase all restrictions on Iranian nuclear production by 2030.
Now, his challenge, according to experts, will fulfill more than Mr. Obama.
