Trump Wants an Iran Nuclear Deal, but It Must Be Better Than Obama’s

In 2016, running for president and pressed for details on how he would handle some of the world’s knottiest security issues, then-candidate Donald J. Trump had a simple formula for defanging the Iranian nuclear program.

Barack Obama’s negotiating team, he said, should have just gotten up from the table and stormed out. The Iranians would have come begging. “It’s a deal that could’ve been so much better just if they’d walked a couple of times,” Mr. Trump told two reporters from The New York Times. “They negotiated so badly.”

Now, at a moment the Iranians are far closer to being able to produce a weapon than they were when the last accord was negotiated — in part because Mr. Trump himself upended the deal in 2018 — the president has his chance to show how it should have been done.

So far, the gap between the two sides appears huge. The Iranians sound like they are looking for an updated version of the Obama-era agreement, which limited Iran’s stockpiles of nuclear material. The Americans want to dismantle a vast nuclear-fuel enrichment infrastructure, the country’s missile program and Tehran’s longtime support for Hamas, Hezbollah and other proxy forces.

What is missing is time.

“It is essential that we reach an agreement quickly,” said Senator Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, the top Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee, who called Mr. Trump’s decision to pull out of the Iran nuclear deal a “serious mistake.” “Iran’s nuclear program is advancing every day, and with snapback sanctions set to expire soon, we are at risk of losing one of our most critical points of leverage.”

Snapback sanctions allow for the quick reimposition of United Nations sanctions against Iran. They are set to expire Oct. 18.

The pressure is now on for Mr. Trump to get a deal that is far tougher on Iran than what was agreed to during the Obama administration, which will be the measuring stick for whether Mr. Trump reached his own goals. For leverage, his administration is already threatening the possibility of military strikes if the talks don’t go well, though it leaves unclear whether the United States, Israel or a combined force would execute those strikes.

Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, promised Tuesday there would be “hell to pay” if the Iranians didn’t negotiate with Mr. Trump.

“The Iranians are going to be surprised when they find out they aren’t dealing with Barack Obama or John Kerry,” said Senator Jim Risch, Republican of Idaho and the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, referring to the secretary of state who oversaw the American negotiations. “This is a whole different ballgame.”

The negotiations begin on Saturday, with Steve Witkoff, the president’s friend and fellow New York real estate developer, reportedly leading the American team. Mr. Witkoff, who is also handling negotiations over Gaza and Ukraine, has no known background in the complex technology of nuclear fuel enrichment, or the many steps to nuclear bomb making.

The first question he will face is the scope of the negotiation. The Obama-era deal dealt only with the nuclear program. It didn’t touch Iran’s missile program — that was under separate strictures by the United Nations, which Tehran ignored — or its support of terrorism.

Michael Waltz, the national security adviser, has said a new agreement with the Trump administration must deal with everything, and that Iran’s vast nuclear facilities must be completely dismantled — not just left in place, running at dead slow, as they were in the 2015 deal.

“Iran has to give up its program in a way that the entire world can see,” he said on CBS’s “Face the Nation” in March. He talked about “full dismantlement,” a situation that would leave Iran largely defenseless: no missiles, no proxy forces, no pathway to a bomb.

Mr. Trump said on Monday that the talks with Iran would be “direct,’’ meaning U.S. negotiators would interact with their Iranian counterparts. So far the Iranians have a different story: Abbas Araghchi, Iran’s foreign minister, published an essay in The Washington Post on Tuesday saying the country was “ready for indirect negotiations with the United States.” Mr. Araghchi said the United States must first pledge to take a military option against Iran off the table.

“Clearly, they’re saying they want to talk,” said Jim Walsh, a senior research associate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Security Studies Program. “But there’s negotiation, and then there’s capitulation. Is this a list of demands or we get attacked? That’s not going to work.”

The negotiating environment carries higher stakes than during the Obama administration. Iran’s nuclear program has advanced since Mr. Trump discarded the previous deal; today it is producing uranium enriched to 60 percent purity, just below bomb-grade. American intelligence agencies have concluded that Iran is exploring a faster, if cruder, approach to developing an atomic weapon that would take months, instead of a year or two, if its leadership decides to race for a bomb.

But in other ways, Iran is in a weaker negotiating position.

Israel destroyed almost all of Iran’s air defenses protecting its nuclear facilities in October. And Iran’s regional proxies, Hezbollah and Hamas, are significantly weakened and in no condition to threaten Israel with retaliation should the Iranian facilities come under attack.

There are other factors at play.

Iran could leverage its relationship with Russia at a time when the United States is trying to negotiate an end to the invasion of Ukraine. The Justice Department has accused Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps of seeking to assassinate Mr. Trump last year, the shadow of which hangs over the negotiations. And would Israel and congressional Republicans accept whatever nuclear deal is reached, even if it ends up being weaker than what the Obama team negotiated?

Dennis Jett, a professor of international affairs at Pennsylvania State University who wrote a book about the Iran nuclear deal, said Mr. Trump was unlikely to take the threat of military strikes off the table, making the chance of a successful negotiation remote.

“I think these talks are going to be short-lived and unproductive,” he said, adding that Mr. Witkoff is “a New York real estate guy, and he seems to think that diplomacy is just doing a deal. You negotiate back and forth and sign the deal. It’s not that simple.”

Karim Sadjadpour, an Iranian American policy analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said there was a risk the Trump negotiating team was out of its element.

“You’re not negotiating a final price tag or a grand bargain, but highly technical issues like uranium enrichment levels, centrifuge specifications and inspection regimes,” he said. “There is an ocean of space between saying that Iran can’t have a nuclear weapon and that Iran’s nuclear program must be ‘dismantled’ like Libya’s. There is a risk that the U.S. side, which currently lacks clear expertise and a defined endgame, will be out-negotiated by an Iranian side that has both.”

Seyed Hossein Mousavian, a Middle East security and nuclear policy specialist at Princeton University, said he believed there was a chance of success for the negotiations, where both sides leave the table with an outcome they can sell to the people of their countries, including one in which Iran submits to regular inspections.

“Steve Witkoff, to my understanding, he really wants to make a deal. He really doesn’t want war, and he has the same mind-set as President Trump,” Mr. Mousavian said. “Therefore, I see the chance. But the reality is that Iran and the U.S. have 45 years of hostilities to resolve and to agree is very complicated.”