Trump Thinks an Iran Deal Will Be His New Russia Deal. Fat Luck.
Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily.
With the clear crushing of his dreams about winning a Nobel Prize for ending the war in Ukraine, President Donald Trump is now setting his sights on equally grand history by making a deal that halts Iran's pursuit of a nuclear weapon. He is likely to find this reverie equally fantastical.
First, there is the awkward fact that in his first term, Trump scuttled an agreement that struck just such a deal, for the sole reason that the deal had been negotiated by his predecessor and object of loathing, Barack Obama. In the seven years since the sabotage, Tehran's leaders have revived their nuclear program and are now closer than ever to building an actual bomb. Among other things, this makes it unlikely that they would agree to a deal more restrictive than Obama's—or that Trump and entourage would swallow a deal that puts lighter clamps on the Islamic Republic's aims and capabilities.
Second, even leaving history aside, the conditions that Trump and his entourage say they would place on a new nuclear deal make it all but impossible for the mullahs of Tehran to agree. The main obstacle is Trump's insistence on Iran's “ total dismantlement ” of every aspect of its nuclear program, including its uranium enrichment facilities. It is hard to imagine any reward that would lure the Iranians to go that far.
In the first phase of the original Iran nuclear talks, Obama and his P5+1 negotiating partners (China, France, Germany, Russia, and the United Kingdom) insisted on an enrichment ban. But they soon realized that the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty —concluded in 1970, ratified by the United Nations, and signed by 190 countries (including Iran)—explicitly allows the signatories to enrich uranium to a purity level of 3 percent; enough to generate electrical power. The American and Soviet officials who drafted the NPT half a century ago lured other countries to sign not only by allowing them to harness nuclear energy but by assisting them to do so; the treaty guaranteed them the necessary technology, as part of a program called “Atoms for Peace.”
Uranium enriched to 3 percent is a long way from the roughly 90 percent level needed for weapons-grade stuff. But the technology is the same, and the step up to 90 percent from 60 percent —Iran's level at the moment—is minor.
This has always been a loophole in the NPT. A country could sign on, start enriching uranium while staying within the treaty's limits, and then one day suddenly exceed those limits and declare itself a nuclear-weapons state.
Still, the Iranian delegates to the Obama-era talks argued that they should not be denied a right that an international treaty granted to almost every other country on Earth. Besides, an annex to the NPT—which Iran had also signed—allowed international inspectors to verify compliance with the treaty's limits. The argument was compelling—and the Obama-era deal stiffened the inspections. (Trump's first secretary of defense, retired Gen. James Mattis, declared early on in his term that the deal's verification clauses, which he said he'd read three times, were “ robust .”)
Vice President JD Vance recently said that the only countries now enriching uranium are those that have nuclear weapons. If this were true, it would be a persuasive argument that a treaty barring Iranians from nuclear weapons should also bar them from enrichment—but it isn't true. Five other countries possessing no nuclear weapons—Argentina, Brazil, Germany, Japan, and the Netherlands—happen to enrich uranium. In other words, Iran's program—especially a program whose level of enrichment is limited by an arms control agreement—implies nothing about its intention.
It would be nice if senior US officials talked with expert advisers—or even consulted Google—before speaking in public about a subject.
Trump, of course, is the model for those who feel no obligation to fact-check before yammering. On this issue, Trump said it's fine if Iran uses uranium for electrical power as long as it doesn't use it to build nuclear weapons—ignoring, or perhaps not knowing, that the NPT and the Obama-era Iran nuclear deal allowed precisely this distinction. He also said that he would love to lift the economic sanctions against Iran, allowing its people to lead better and richer lives, in exchange for the dismantlement of its nuclear programs—again ignoring, or perhaps not precisely knowing, that this was the essence of the Obama deal.
It's worth wondering what Benjamin Netanyahu thinks of all this. Israel's prime minister was instrumental in convincing Trump, back in 2018, to scuttle the first Iran nuclear deal. Many Israeli military and security officers supported Obama's deal , some in public, others more quietly, noting that it was at least better than no deal at all. Some of those officers thought at the time—I don't know whether they knew —that Netanyahu objected not so much to the section limiting Iranian nukes but rather to the section lifting sanctions and thus allowing Iran to reenter the global economy and as a participant in legitimate Middle Eastern diplomacy. Trump, after his latest reversal, is holding out the latter prospects as a positive development.
Trump hopes to hold direct talks with Iran's President Masoud Pezeshkian later this month after first visiting Saudi Arabia. Pezeshkian, a moderate by his country's standards, has advocated reopening relations with the West, even resuming some version of the nuclear deal if it means the lifting of sanctions. It is possible that the two presidents could sign a statement of principles guiding new nuclear talks.
But it's the details that matter. It took Iran and the P5+1 countries two years to thread the details of the 159-page deal, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action , signed—and ratified by the UN—in 2015. Trump tends to think deals, even big deals, can be hammered out in an instant. In this case, he doesn't know—or think he needs to know—the broad outlines of what would make a new deal acceptable to all sides. And to the extent he's spoken about it, his notion of the broad outlines wouldn't be acceptable at all.
Sign up for Slate's evening newsletter.
