Foreign Affairs:

What Washington Needs From Nuclear Negotiations With Tehran

By Richard Nephew
Senior Research Scholar at Columbia University

Of all the consensus-bucking foreign policy moves that U.S. President Donald Trump has undertaken, few have been more surprising than the resurrection of nuclear talks with Iran. Trump, after all, pulled the United States from the 2015 nuclear deal, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, in 2018. And after four years in which the Biden administration failed to negotiate a deal to replace the JCPOA, the prospects for a new agreement seemed slim. Instead, during those seven intervening years, Iran produced enough near-weapons-grade enriched uranium for multiple warheads.

Yet despite their history of enmity, Tehran and Washington have shown consistent, mutual interest in a deal since Trump’s return to the White House. Over the course of several rounds of talks, the two sides have even sketched out potential frameworks. Both have clear motivations for getting a deal done. The Trump administration wants to restore some strategic stability to the Middle East and Trump is personally invested in bolstering his image as a dealmaker. Iran, still suffering under the U.S. sanctions regime, wants lasting economic relief and a pause in hostilities after the weakening of many of its proxies.

But although Trump has said that he wants to deal with the nuclear issue quickly and insists that an agreement is close, longstanding, core issues between the two parties are likely to bedevil the process. U.S. concerns with Iran’s enrichment program and its funding of proxies will remain a sticking point; so will Iran’s reticence to scale back its nuclear program and its concerns about the durability of any U.S. deal, given that Trump broke the last one. It will be hard for Iran to concede enough to make a nuclear agreement worthwhile for the United States without crossing Tehran’s own redlines.

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