The difficult option facing Trump in Iranian nuclear talks

The confrontation between President Trump’s negotiating team and Iran is summarizing in this: whether the United States is ready to risk Iran to continue the production of nuclear fuel if the alternative is not a deal and another war in the Middle East.

For Mr. Trump and his private envoy, Steve Witkev, negotiations with Iran are a new experience, and Iran’s insistence that it will never give in its ability to enrich uranium on soil threats to threaten an agreement that just a few weeks ago was at hand.

But what was faced by President Barack Obama a decade ago. Filty, Mr. Obama and his aides concluded that the only path of the agreement is to allow Iran to continue to produce small quantities of nuclear fuel, while maintaining the nuclear centrifugal spinning and its work of scientists.

The deal – an agreement that every Republican in Congress voted against some Democrats – contained Iran’s ambitions for three years until Mr. Trump withdrew from him. Iran was compatible with the terms of the agreement.

Mr. Trump is now facing the same options that faced his first predecessor. Like Mr. Obama, he faces possible opposition from Iran Hoks in the United States and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu from Israel, who went to a joint session of Congress a decade ago and urged legislators to reject the deal that Mr. Obama was negotiating. In recent months, Mr. Netanyahu has been pressing for a preventive strike on Iranian nuclear sites.

“There is a little Diga Fu here,” Windy Sherman, who was the chief negotiator in the 2015 Obama Agreement. “It is clear that there are American Senate members, members of Congress and Israeli officials who insist on complete dismantling of Iran’s facilities and enriching zero. We faced the same challenges.”

She said that she wished Mr. Wittouf well, noting that he recently said that he was in Iran’s negotiations, as is the case in real estate deals in New York, it was important to know what everyone was searching for, and made them feel that they got something.

“He has a difficult task,” said Ms. Sherman, who later worked as deputy foreign minister.

But Iranian officials indicated that “it was very clear that they needed enrichment, not only in small quantities. I doubt that they will transfer this situation.” She noted that Mr. Trump has some available tools that Mr. Obama did not do, including a compatible Congress and more space to lift the ban on Iran.

Mr. Trump appears to admit Monday that negotiations have taken a difficult turn. Mr. Trump said on Monday: “They are just asking about things that you cannot do,” said Mr. Trump on Monday. “They do not want to give up what they have to abandon. You know what this is: they are seeking fertilization.”

Iran says it has not officially responded to Mr. Trump and Mr. Wittakov, who invented what he was hoping to be an innovative compromise. Under his proposal, Iran will be allowed to continue enriching at low levels for several years, until a consortium has been formed that would provide nuclear fuel for power plants throughout the Middle East.

Fuel production in a consortium will be held somewhere in the area. Under the American proposal, production cannot occur on Iranian soil. For years, other proposals have been made to transfer production to the islands in the Persian Gulf, where the facilities will be built on the ground and can be monitored more easily – or destroyed.

Since it is likely that it took years, perhaps a decade, to get the consortium and its operation, Mr. Witkoff saw the proposal as a graceful way for everyone to announce the victory. Iran could say it was a scattering in the foreseeable future. Mr. Trump can argue that he got something that Mr. Obama did not do: an obligation to end the fertilization.

So far, it has not succeeded. Iranian officials said they are open to the idea of ​​a consortium, as long as it is on Iranian soil.

The supreme leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khounai, rejected the idea as a Western trick to remove Tehran from the nuclear fuel. But both the Iranian Mr. Witkev and the Iranian negotiators are aware of the risk of leaving negotiations: Mr. Netanyahu may fail to renew his campaign to take military measures.

Since one of them wants to risk a war, the two sides avoid any advertisements that negotiations are on a dead end. Negotists meet this week in Amman, which works as a mediator.

Nobody speaks by stagnation. Mr. Trump, who demanded in the early April message to the supreme leader that a deal must be concluded within two months, no longer discusses the final dates.

In an hour -long video interview with Irna, Majid Takht Rafshi, the Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister and senior negotiations. He added: “This is our red line.”

This leaves Mr. Trump in a difficult place, and government officials recognize. The Iranian threat is greater than it was a decade ago: the country has now produced a lot of fuel at the levels of the bomb near the quality that it could come out fuel for 10 nuclear weapons in a short time. (Transforming them into a operating weapon will take more months, and perhaps year, as experts say).

And the fact that Iran The air defenses led to an Israeli missile attack in October, prompting Mr. Netanyahu to say that there was no better opportunity to attack nuclear sites in the country, even if Israel did not have the weapons needed to reach the deepest production sites. The Iranian National Security Council said in a statement on Monday that it will move with strikes on Israel’s nuclear facilities if Israel attacked Iranian nuclear sites.

“The most sensitive sites are half a mile underground,” said Raphael Grossi, Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency, which examines Iranian nuclear establishments, noting that he visited the site.

Mr. Trump, Mr. Wittakov, Foreign Minister Marco Rubio and military leaders met at Camp David on Sunday night, according to what was reported to discuss diplomatic and military options. It is not clear what the conclusions they reached, if any.

The next morning, he is still in the presidential retreat, Mr. Trump spoke to Mr. Netanyahu, partly to keep him listed, but mostly, one official said, to ensure that he did not reduce negotiations by threatening imminent military action.

That conversation was only the latest in an increasingly tense relationship between Mr. Trump and Mr. Netanyahu. His partners, the Israeli Prime Minister, says, at the extent to which Mr. Trump insisted on an investigation into a diplomatic solution.

It was widely seen that the removal of Michael Waltz as a national security adviser to Mr. Trump in Washington as a partial motivation from the traditional views of Mr. Waltz from Iran, which was the base in the Republican Party in Mr. Trump’s first state.

In fact, Mr. Trump’s party is now divided between hawks, insisting on the complete disintegration of Iranian infrastructure and a more isolated camp that the most important thing is to avoid the United States absorbing another war in the Middle East.

To date, Mr. Trump danced and his closest aides between these two camps.

The inspectors say that the Iranian centrifugal devices are always circulating, giving the country more fuel that can be used to build a weapon – or circulate it in a deal.