Iran is playing with fire by rejecting US nuclear plan

US President Donald Trump, left, and Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.

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Iran’s Supreme Leader has taken a dangerous gamble by effectively rejecting Donald Trump’s proposed diplomatic solution for the future of his country’s nuclear program.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s attack on the “rude and arrogant leaders of America” for opposing his country’s nuclear industry has greatly increased the possibility that Israel or the US will choose to bomb his country’s nuclear facilities.

Trump is clearly losing patience with Iran, describing it as “slow walking” its negotiations with the US over ways to stop its march towards a nuclear weapon capability.

The impasse between the two countries is a simple one. The US demands that Iran abandon all uranium enrichment in Iran because it is leading quickly and inevitably to the ability to produce a nuclear weapon at short notice.

Iran insists its nuclear industry is only for civil purposes, not military, and that its ability to enrich uranium is a sovereign right which no nation can take away.

Given this, the US has put forward a compromise proposal whereby Iran is allowed to temporarily continue enriching uranium at low levels while the US helps build nuclear power reactors for Iran and enrichment facilities to be managed by a consortium of countries. Once they are completed, Iran would have to stop enriching its own uranium in Iran.

This is the best outcome Iran can hope for given that Trump stated again this week that the US “will not allow any enrichment of Uranium.”

While negotiations between the two countries are not yet dead, Khamenei has all but rejected the US proposal by saying that the US demand that it abandon uranium enrichment was ‘100 per cent’ against Tehran’s interests.

Iran’s “response to the US government’s nonsense is clear,” he said in a speech this week. He claimed it would be “useless” for Iran to build nuclear power plants without being able to enrich uranium over the long term.

“The rude and arrogant leaders of America repeatedly demand that we should not have a nuclear program,” Khamenei said, adding that “They cannot do anything about this.”

These are foolish comments which place his nuclear facilities in grave danger of being dismantled by force. Iran is lucky that the US is offering such a compromise deal at all – indeed Trump’s approach has been criticised by some in the US as being too lenient toward Iran. In his first term as president, Trump tore up Barack Obama’s Iran nuclear deal on the ground that it was too lenient and that the country simply could not be trusted not to try to build a nuclear bomb.

There are good reasons not to trust Iran. The International Atomic Energy Agency this month revealed Iran has surged forward with its enrichment program, to the extent that its stockpile of uranium has now been enriched to 60 per cent purity – near the 90 per cent needed to produce nuclear weapons. Experts believe it would only take months for Iran to build a bomb if it wanted to.

If the current negotiations fail, then an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities by Israel appears inevitable. Israel was reportedly ready to strike Iran last month but Trump said no, preferring to give time for a diplomatic solution to be found.

But if Iran does not agree to the US proposal – or a variant of it – then military action is likely. Such an attack is unlikely to fully knock out Iran’s nuclear industry given that its most valuable facilities are buried deep underground. But it is likely to set Iran’s nuclear program back by many months or years, especially if Israel is assisted in military action by the US. These are high stakes for Khamenei to gamble with. By rejecting the US offer in such forceful and abusive terms the Iranian leader is – to use a Trumpian term – playing with fire.