High stakes negotiations: US, Iran to hold nuclear talks

Tehran and Washington will convene nuclear talks in Oman on Saturday, launching the two adversaries with clashing objectives into high stakes negotiations.

The US and Iran said Monday that they would convene nuclear talks Saturday, launching the two adversaries with clashing objectives into high stakes negotiations.

President Trump said the meeting would involve direct negotiations between high level US and Iranian officials, while Iran’s Foreign Minister, Abbas Araghchi, said they would be indirect talks in Oman.

The talks will test Trump’s ability to roll back Iran’s nuclear program that has left it closer than ever to a workable weapon and to improve upon a prior agreement that he ripped up in his first term.

For Iran, the challenge will be to convince Trump to ease sanctions and to avoid a military conflict with the US and possibly Israel, while keeping key elements of its nuclear work intact, analysts say.

While Trump has stressed his hope for a diplomatic solution, he has also threatened to take military action against Iran if no deal is reached.

The negotiations thus present a major new foreign policy risk for the administration, which is already struggling to end fighting between Russia and Ukraine, conducting air strikes against Iranian-backed Houthi militants in Yemen and seeking to defuse the conflict in Gaza.

Revealing the planned talks on Monday after a White House meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Trump said they would involve direct talks with Iran.

“I think everybody agrees that doing a deal would be preferable to doing the obvious,” Trump said, apparently referring to military strikes on Iran. “So we are going to see if we can avoid it, but it’s getting to be very dangerous territory, and hopefully those talks will be successful.” Araghchi said in announcing the talks in a post on X, “It is as much an opportunity as it is a test. The ball is in America’s court.”

Steve Witkoff, Trump’s special envoy on Middle East and Russia issues, will likely be a member of the US negotiating team, which Trump said would be “at almost the highest level.” If the US and Iran hold face-to-face talks, they would be the first direct nuclear talks between the countries since former President Barack Obama reached a nuclear agreement with Iran in 2015, from which Trump withdrew during his first term. Iranian officials reiterated Monday, before Trump’s remarks, that they would only agree to indirect talks for now, mediated by a third party.

Trump officials say they are intent on direct negotiations to avoid prolonged and possibly inconclusive talks, such as the failed effort early in the Biden administration to revive the scrapped nuclear deal that Trump abandoned.

Iran refused to negotiate directly at the time. Many of the diplomats involved said that approach made talks slower and harder.

“You know, a lot of people say, ‘Oh, maybe you’re going through surrogates, or you’re not dealing directly, you’re dealing through other countries.’ No, we’re dealing with them directly,” Trump said.

Araghchi said Sunday that direct talks with the US would be “meaningless,” given the direct threats the US had made recently against Iran. He said Tehran remained open to indirect talks.

Iran says its nuclear work is for peaceful purposes, as allowed under international law, and that it has no intention of building nuclear weapons.

Its supply of highly enriched fissile material has grown substantially. It would take just a week or two to have enough weapons-grade fissile material for a nuclear weapon but at least several months more for Tehran to assemble an actual nuclear device if it chose to field a weapon, according to Western estimates.

The Trump administration’s demands go far beyond the 2015 nuclear accord negotiated by the Obama administration, under which Iran secured the right to enrich uranium for what it claims is a peaceful nuclear program. That accord, until it was abandoned by the US, suspended most international sanctions on Tehran in exchange for tight but temporary limits on its nuclear program.

US national security adviser Michael Waltz has said that in a new agreement Tehran should have no enrichment capabilities, no ability to produce a nuclear weapon and no strategic ballistic missiles.

Iran has already produced enough highly enriched uranium for more than half a dozen nuclear weapons and any new agreement will have to roll back its stockpile of material. The US also would have to deal with a problem that wasn’t seen as imminent in 2015: Iran’s relatively swift ability to build some kind of nuclear weapon.

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That could entail the kind of intrusive inspection regime, including of Iran’s military sites, that Tehran has resisted in the past. US intelligence agencies told Congress last month that Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei hadn’t given the go-ahead to build a weapon, though pressure had probably grown on him to do so.

A deal would also need to handle the Iranian insistence that Washington won’t tear up a new accord, as it did before.

Iran will go into talks under greater pressure than it has been in many decades. The country is struggling with a weak economy, including high inflation, and Iran has seen its most powerful militia allies in the region, such as Hezbollah, severely weakened by Israel. That has taken away its most powerful deterrent against an Israeli attack.

Also, Iran’s most advanced air-defence systems were wiped out last year in tit-for-tat military strikes with Israel, making any attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities easier.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration has been adding new sanctions against vessels and refineries involved in Iran’s oil exports, which go mainly to China.

Iran has made clear in recent days its preference to hold any new talks with the US in Oman.

Face-to-face US-Iran talks were critical to securing the 2015 nuclear deal, with senior US and Iranian officials able to gradually seal agreement on the many technical aspects of a nuclear accord.

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