The Art of the Nuclear Deal

“If President Trump has maintained any consistency in his Iran policy over the years, it’s his conviction that the theocratic regime in Tehran should never be allowed to develop a nuclear weapon.

 

He ran for president three times on that principle. As commander in chief, he has ordered two complex military operations that aimed to eliminate Iran’s nuclear program. Now he’s hoping his diplomatic team will be able to finally hammer out a deal at a second round of talks in Pakistan to curb Tehran’s nuclear ambitions for decades to come.

 

It’s an admirable goal. Restricting Iran’s ability to sprint for the bomb and curtailing its enrichment of uranium for the foreseeable future would be good not only for the United States, but for the globe. An agreement doing so would maintain a strategic balance in a volatile region where wars are a regular occurrence and reduce the chances of setting off an arms race there.

 

It’s also something that Mr. Trump owes to the world: The debt has been due since 2018, when he ripped up the landmark multilateral nuclear agreement with Iran, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. Signed in 2015 during the Obama administration, the agreement placed strict limits on Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for sweeping relief from Western economic sanctions.

 

After Mr. Trump withdrew the United States from the agreement, Tehran aggressively pressed ahead with its program, installing thousands of advanced centrifuges in underground labs that generated an estimated 970-pound stockpile of uranium enriched to 60 percent purity. The expansion put the nation just weeks away from having enough material, if further enriched, to build about 10 bombs.

 

Any new agreement Mr. Trump authorizes must achieve the earlier deal’s comparably rigid terms, or it will be widely and correctly dismissed as insufficient. The 20-year enrichment freeze that the administration has proposed to Iran is a worthwhile aim — even if it’s an unlikely one — but it must be accompanied by Iran consenting to allow international inspectors back into its facilities and a guarantee that it will hand over its current stockpile to the United States or another nuclear power.

 

Anything short of this will be a step back from the 2015 nuclear agreement. Under that deal, Iran’s uranium enrichment was limited to a purity of 3.67 percent, and the International Atomic Energy Agency monitored the program through sweeping on-site inspections, surveillance cameras and the verification of seals on critical equipment at the nation’s known nuclear facilities.

 

Securing that deal was no easy task. It took 20 months and collaboration among world powers to get to terms everyone could live with. “Reaching an agreement of this magnitude is like solving a Rubik’s Cube,” said Wendy Sherman, the chief negotiator of the nuclear accord in the Obama administration. “It takes time, patience and attention to detail. Nothing is finished until all the elements fit together.”

 

For all Mr. Trump’s talk about wanting fewer nukes in the world, he’s done little to back his words with actions. He’s abandoned nuclear deals, increased weapons budgets, and fired scores of diplomats and technical experts who specialize in nuclear nonproliferation details.

 

The planned meeting in Islamabad underscores the problem. Leading the U.S. negotiating effort there will be Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, who have much more experience in Manhattan real estate than they do on nuclear issues. Iran’s negotiation team, meanwhile, includes Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, who was one of Ms. Sherman’s counterparts during the negotiations more than a decade ago.

 

The Trump administration is also largely going it alone. Russia, China, Britain, Germany, France and the European Union worked in unison to find common diplomatic ground with Iran in 2015. That kind of global solidarity is no longer possible for a range of reasons — not least Mr. Trump’s approach to diplomacy during his time in office — but the president would be wise to attempt to involve other nations. Trust between Washington and Tehran is at a nadir and outsiders could provide much needed help on key aspects.

 

Russia has repeatedly offered to take Iran’s highly enriched uranium, just as it did when the nuclear agreement was agreed. Mr. Trump has thus far rebuffed Moscow’s proposal, but he should reconsider. Iran has already rejected the president’s insistence that the material, which he benignly refers to “nuclear dust,” go to the United States. “Transferring uranium to the United States has not been ​an option for us,” an Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman, Esmail Baghaei, recently said on state television.

 

Mr. Trump has said the war cannot end until the nuclear question is settled. The International Atomic Energy Agency believes that much of the material is still stored inside tunnels at the Isfahan nuclear complex. Because of damage at the site from U.S.-Israeli airstrikes last June, heavy machinery will be needed to dig it out.

 

“If Iran keeps its current stock of highly enriched uranium that will mean both that the negotiations have failed and that the war itself was a failure,” said Scott D. Sagan, a professor and nuclear expert at Stanford University. “President Trump may well declare victory if he gets Iran to agree to a deal about their future enrichment capabilities, but if they are permitted to keep around 10 bombs worth of material, it will be a Pyrrhic victory.”

 

Iran’s leadership has an even greater incentive to build the bomb now, having been attacked twice in the past year by the United States and Israel. And the proliferation threat looms beyond Iran. If Tehran goes nuclear, it could set off a domino effect across the Middle East, prompting rivals like Saudi Arabia, Turkey and others to consider pursuing bomb programs of their own.

 

Mr. Trump’s past criticisms of the 2015 nuclear agreement centered on how it failed to address Iran’s other malign activities in the Middle East, including its support for terrorism, its prolific missile program and its meddling in places like Yemen and Syria. Rather than trying to solve this laundry list of problems in the talks, Mr. Trump should instead take a cue from the Obama team and focus his own team’s aims on the nuclear target. Cobbling together a grand bargain that addresses all of America’s grievances with the regime will most likely distract from the goal at hand, and could be counterproductive in achieving it.

 

“We should start small and try to work on problems one at a time,” said Jeffrey Lewis, a nuclear weapons analyst with the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies in Monterey, Calif. “That was the idea of the Iran nuclear deal — solve one problem, then move on to the next.”

 

Given the turmoil in world oil markets in recent weeks, Tehran knows it holds a deterrent that falls short of a nuclear weapon: its control of the Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly one-fifth of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas passed before the war. Tehran has shown that despite losing much of its military capacity, it can choke off the global economy just by dropping mines in the Strait and threatening passing ships with drones. “Iran has tested its nuclear weapons,” Dmitri Medvedev, the former president of Russia, wrote on social media in early April. “It’s called the Strait of Hormuz. Its potential is inexhaustible.”

 

While this may be true, it’s also true that the value of Iran’s currency recently collapsed to a near record low of 1.3 million rials to the U.S. dollar, part of a staggering drop over the last year. In the lead-up to the 2015 deal, its economy was faltering, and the resulting Iranian protests over rising inflation helped push the regime to negotiate.

 

Mr. Trump built his early political career lambasting that agreement. He now has a chance to exhibit his own art of a nuclear deal.

 

This Times Opinion essay is funded through philanthropic support from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Outrider Foundation and the Prospect Hill Foundation. Funders have no control over the selection or focus of articles or the editing process and do not review articles before publication. The Times retains full editorial control.” [1]

 

1. The Art of the Nuclear Deal. Hennigan, W J.  New York Times (Online) New York Times Company. Apr 25, 2026.