Hamster fun and information The Morning: New talks with Iran
Good morning. China has raised tariffs on U.S. imports to 125 percent. The Supreme Court sided with a man the government wrongly deported to El Salvador. A helicopter on a sightseeing tour crashed in New York, killing a pilot and a family of five tourists. More news is below. But first, we explain this weekend’s nuclear negotiations with Iran.
Iran talks
Tomorrow, the United States will resume nuclear negotiations with Iran for the first time since Tehran lost most of its proxy forces — including thousands of fighters for Hamas and Hezbollah — and its bet that Donald Trump would not return to the Oval Office. No country has worked harder on a nuclear bomb without actually building one than the Islamic Republic. Nor has any country insisted more loudly that it wouldn’t build a weapon. Now, despite years of technical setbacks, assassinated scientists and sabotaged nuclear facilities, Iran is almost capable of pulling it off — if it makes the political decision to do so, Western intelligence agencies say. It could produce bomb-grade fuel in weeks and a workable weapon in months to a year or so. Israel is once again threatening military action, and the United States has moved B-2 stealth bombers in range. Trump insists military action won’t be necessary if Iran makes a deal — but it has to move fast at the point of a gun. So talks begin tomorrow in Oman between Trump’s personal negotiator, Steve Witkoff, and Iran’s foreign minister. I’ve covered the Iranian nuclear program for more than two decades. Today, I’ll explain what changed in recent years and examine the chances that diplomacy might work. Washington’s viewAfter Iran watched the United States oust regimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, it stopped developing a nuclear warhead, U.S. intelligence concluded. But Tehran kept options open. It got better at enriching uranium even as it insisted the work was for power plants, medical isotopes and research. Iran had that right under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. But the past five presidents feared it would be too easy for the theocracy — one that still reaches for chants like “Death to America” and threatens to obliterate Israel — to fabricate a bomb. So Israel covertly killed a number of Iranian nuclear scientists. (Assassins wove through traffic to attach “sticky bombs” to their car doors.) The U.S. and Israel created a computer virus that seized control of nuclear centrifuges and blew them up. The sabotage campaign helped bring Iranians to the negotiating table with the Obama administration, China, Russia and some European nations. Iran agreed to ship 97 percent of its nuclear fuel out of the country. But the deal had weaknesses: Iran retained its nuclear-enrichment infrastructure and the deal would expire in 2030. In exchange, the U.S. and other nations lifted economic sanctions. Obama bet that, with time, a younger generation would push Iran to a more Western-leaning posture. The agreement polarized Congress. Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, lobbied against it, arguing the Iranians would cheat. Trump pulled out of the deal in 2018 — over the objections of national security aides who noted it was working. Then, in 2020, Trump ordered the U.S. military to kill a beloved Iranian general who had overseen many of the region’s deadliest strikes on Americans and their allies. The Iranians vowed revenge, and they tried to hire a hit squad to assassinate Trump on the campaign trail, according to an indictment last year. (Iran denies involvement.) It began enriching uranium to near-bomb-grade quality. The country now has enough for roughly six bombs. Tehran’s view
Iran detests Trump, who says the country will be in “great danger” if it fails to strike a deal. But Trump is clearly more open than President Biden was. Officials in Tehran feel defenseless, since Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis in Yemen — all nurtured and supplied by the Islamic Republic — have been pummeled. Iran’s own missile attacks on Israel last year were a failure. And sanctions are still hurting. I asked Rob Malley, who worked on the 2015 deal and then represented President Biden for talks with Iran that led nowhere, how the Iranians think about the latest two presidents. “Biden was lukewarm about a deal; Trump is eager. Biden fixates on domestic politics; Trump couldn’t care less. Biden was calculating; Trump, impulsive,” Malley told me. “Trump is throwing caution, prudence and logic to the wind. Which is why there is probably a greater chance of some kind of understanding now than there ever was under the prior administration.” In short, Trump benefits from “madman theory”: The Iranians believe he may give Netanyahu the green light and the weapons to attack — or even join in the operation. A possible dealThe Iranians clearly hope for an agreement like the one from 2015: Give up some fuel stockpiles but retain fuel-making capability. Trump’s national security adviser says a deal must require “full dismantlement” of the nuclear program, along with the ability to make missiles or support terror groups. Netanyahu says that the Iranians must “blow up” their facilities under American supervision. Of course, after denouncing the 2015 deal, Trump will be under pressure to get a better one that prevents Iran from rebuilding. The most likely outcome for the weekend is that the two sides define what topics this negotiation is about. Trump refused on Wednesday to say how long talks could take. But American officials say they are determined not to get stuck quibbling over every facility, timeline and verification of compliance. Of course, as Trump discovered in dealing with the Ukraine war, if this problem were easily solvable, it would have been resolved long ago.
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