The standoff between President Trump’s negotiating team and Iran boils down to this: whether the United States is willing to risk allowing Iran to continue producing nuclear fuel if the alternative is no deal and the possibility of another war in the Middle East.
To Mr. Trump and his special envoy, Steve Witkoff, the negotiations with Iran are a new experience, and Iran’s insistence that it will never surrender its ability to enrich uranium on its soil threatens to scuttle an agreement that the president only a few weeks ago confidently predicted was within reach.
But it is almost exactly the same vexing dilemma that President Barack Obama faced a decade ago. Reluctantly, Mr. Obama and his aides concluded that the only pathway to an accord was allowing Iran to continue producing small amounts of nuclear fuel, keeping its nuclear centrifuges spinning and its scientists working.
The deal — an agreement that every Republican in Congress voted against, along with some Democrats — contained Iran’s ambitions for three years until Mr. Trump pulled out of it. Iran had been compliant with the terms of the accord.
Mr. Trump is now facing essentially the same choices that confronted his first predecessor. And, like Mr. Obama, he is facing likely opposition from Iran hawks in the United States and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, who went before a joint session of Congress a decade ago and urged lawmakers to reject the deal Mr. Obama had been negotiating. In recent months, Mr. Netanyahu has been pushing for a pre-emptive strike on Iran’s nuclear sites.
“There is a bit of déjà vu here,” said Wendy Sherman, who was the chief negotiator of the 2015 accord for the Obama administration. “Clearly there are U.S. senators, members of Congress and Israeli officials who are insisting on complete dismantlement of Iran’s facilities, and zero enrichment. We faced the same challenges.”
She said she wished Mr. Witkoff well, noting that he said recently that in the Iran negotiations, as in New York real estate deals, it was important to figure out what everyone was looking for, and make them feel like they got something.
“He has a tough task,” said Ms. Sherman, who later served as deputy secretary of state.
But Iranian officials, she noted, “have been very clear that they need to enrich, and not just in minuscule amounts. And I doubt they will move off that position.” She noted that Mr. Trump has some tools available that Mr. Obama did not, including a compliant Congress and more leeway to lift embargoes on Iran.
Mr. Trump seemed to acknowledge on Monday that the negotiations had taken a challenging turn. “They’re just asking for things that you can’t do,” Mr. Trump said on Monday, sounding frustrated. “They don’t want to give up what they have to give up. You know what that is: They seek enrichment.”
Iran says it has not formally responded to Mr. Trump and to Mr. Witkoff, who had devised what he had hoped was an innovative compromise. Under his proposal, Iran would be allowed to keep enriching at low levels for a number of years, until a consortium was formed that would provide nuclear fuel for power plants around the Middle East.
The consortium’s fuel production would take place somewhere in the region. Under the U.S. proposal, the production could not take place on Iranian territory. For years, other proposals have been floated to move production to islands in the Persian Gulf, where the facilities would be built above ground and could be more easily monitored — or destroyed.
Since it likely would have taken years, maybe a decade, to get the consortium up and running, Mr. Witkoff saw the proposal as a graceful way for everyone to declare a win. Iran could say it was enriching for the foreseeable future. Mr. Trump could argue he got something Mr. Obama did not: a commitment to end enrichment.
So far, it has not worked. Iranian officials have said they are open to the idea of a consortium, as long as it is on Iranian soil.
Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, dismissed the idea as a Western ruse to get Tehran out of the nuclear fuel business. But both Mr. Witkoff and Iranian negotiators understand the risk of letting negotiations collapse: Mr. Netanyahu might seize on the failure to renew his campaign to take military action.
Since neither one wants to risk a war, the two sides are avoiding any declarations that negotiations are at a dead end. Negotiators are meeting this weekend in Oman, which is acting as a mediator.
No one is talking about deadlocks. Mr. Trump, who demanded in an early April letter to the supreme leader that a deal must be struck in two months, is no longer discussing deadlines.
Majid Takht-Ravanchi, Iran’s deputy foreign minister and top nuclear negotiator, said in an hourlong video interview with IRNA, the state news agency, that no matter how long negotiations take, “one point is certain, and that is that enrichment must take place in Iran.” He added: “This is our red line.”
That leaves Mr. Trump in a tough spot, government officials concede. The Iranian threat is greater than it was a decade ago: The country has now produced so much fuel at near-bomb-grade levels that it could churn out the fuel for 10 nuclear weapons in short order. (Turning them into an operating weapon would take months more, maybe a year, experts say.)
And the fact that Iran’s air defenses were compromised in an Israeli missile attack in October has led Mr. Netanyahu to argue that there has never been a better opportunity to attack the country’s nuclear sites, even if Israel does not have the weapons needed to get to the deepest production sites. Iran’s Supreme National Security Council said in a statement on Monday that it would retaliate with strikes on Israel’s nuclear facilities if Israel attacked Iranian nuclear sites.
“The most sensitive sites are half a mile underground,” Rafael Grossi, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, which inspects Iran’s nuclear facilities, said recently, noting he had visited the site.
Mr. Trump, Mr. Witkoff, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and military leaders met at Camp David on Sunday night, reportedly to debate the diplomatic and military options. It is not clear what conclusions they reached, if any.
The next morning, still at the presidential retreat, Mr. Trump talked to Mr. Netanyahu, partly to keep him apprised, but mostly, one official said, to make sure he did not upend the negotiations by threatening imminent military action.
That conversation was only the latest in an increasingly tense relationship between Mr. Trump and Mr. Netanyahu. The Israeli prime minister, his associates say, has been surprised at how insistent Mr. Trump has been on probing for a diplomatic solution.
The removal of Michael Waltz as Mr. Trump’s national security adviser was widely seen in Washington as motivated, in part, by Mr. Waltz’s traditional, hard-line views about Iran, which were the norm in the Republican Party in Mr. Trump’s first term.
In fact, Mr. Trump’s own party is now divided between hawks insisting on the full dismantlement of Iran’s infrastructure and a more isolationist camp that says the most important thing is to avoid sucking the United States into another war in the Middle East.
So far Mr. Trump and his closest aides have danced between these two camps.
And inspectors say Iran’s nuclear centrifuges are spinning as fast as ever, giving the country more fuel that could be used to build a weapon — or be traded away in a deal.
