The New York Times:

By David E. SangerFarnaz Fassihi and Lara Jakes

Iran and the United States wrapped up a second round of diplomatic talks over Tehran’s nuclear activities on Saturday, setting an agenda for rapid-paced negotiations that, according to Iranian officials, would not require the dismantlement of the country’s extensive nuclear infrastructure.

Abbas Araghchi, Iran’s foreign minister, said after meeting Steve Witkoff, President Trump’s envoy, that an expert group would meet in the coming days to discuss technical details, including setting the maximum levels to which Iran could enrich uranium, the size of nuclear stockpiles it could retain and how compliance with any agreement could be monitored and verified.

But implicit in that description of the future negotiations was an assumption that President Trump would be willing to back down from the administration’s original insistence that all of Iran’s major nuclear sites and long-range missile arsenals must be subject to what Michael Waltz, Mr. Trump’s national security adviser, recently called “full dismantlement.”

The question of whether to allow Iran to retain the ability to produce nuclear fuel — with the risk that it could use it to create a bomb — has sharply divided Mr. Trump’s advisers. Those divisions have broken out in public in recent days, even as Mr. Witkoff, a real estate developer and friend of the president, was preparing for the talks that took place on Saturday at the residence of the Omani ambassador in Rome. Oman is acting as mediator in the talks.

Iran hawks in the administration, led by Mr. Waltz and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, have argued that it is far too risky to leave Iran with the ability to make its own nuclear fuel.

And agreeing to limits on how much uranium Iran can possess and how much enrichment it can perform exposes Mr. Trump to the critique that he is simply replicating key elements of the 2015 Obama-era nuclear agreement, which he called a “disaster” and ultimately ripped up in 2018.

Iranian officials have said that they will not disassemble or destroy the nuclear infrastructure in which they have invested billions of dollars. Mr. Witkoff has told administration officials privately that if they insist on full dismantlement, he is unlikely to emerge from the talks with a deal — the only way to avoid a military attack on Iran’s facilities, Mr. Trump has said. Israel has been pressing for military action against Iran’s nuclear sites, which would likely involve the United States.

Speaking after the talks ended, a senior administration official noted “very good progress in our direct and indirect discussions,” meaning that the parties spoke face to face as well as through their Omani host.

In private conversations leading up to the session, the Iranians told American officials that they were willing to reduce enrichment levels to those specified in the 2015 agreement struck with the Obama administration: 3.67 percent, the level needed to produce fuel for nuclear power plants.

Since Mr. Trump pulled out of that accord, Iran has been enriching to far higher levels of around 60 percent purity, just shy of what is needed to produce a nuclear weapon. That gives Tehran two options: race to produce weapons-grade fuel, or negotiate with the United States to return to the original levels in the 2015 accord.

But that second option would expose Mr. Trump to the critique that after declaring the decade-old agreement a “disaster” and scrapping it, he is getting nothing better.

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