President Trump says the deal he made with Iran could end the war he started and ensure the country will never have a nuclear weapon. He said that Iran has promised that it will not fulfill the promise it made in the past, including the nuclear deal that was reached with the Obama administration and that was released by Mr.
But details about the future of Iran’s nuclear program have not been settled. Those issues will be discussed 60 days after the two sides are scheduled to sign the deal on Friday.
The text of the agreement has not been released and both sides are negotiating their versions, making it difficult to know exactly what Iran has promised. For example, Iran has in principle agreed to stop enriching uranium for a number of years, but the two sides have not yet agreed on how long that will be.
In a telephone interview with The New York Times on Sunday, Mr. Trump admitted that there had been no agreement. He wants Iran to stop enriching for 20 years; Iran reportedly does not want more than ten years.
The president indicated that he might agree to a 15-year moratorium but also stressed that Iran would end up enriching at low levels “that cannot be used by the military.” But he declined to say what that enrichment level would be, and whether it would match the 3.67 percent purity — enough for human use only — set in the 2015 nuclear deal signed by former President Barack Obama that Mr. He simply said that this new agreement would ensure that “they can only get rich for non-military purposes.
If it is indeed “in perpetuity,” that would be better than the 2015 agreement, which had time limits attached to it.
Iran has also agreed to give up part of its 440 kilograms of uranium enriched to 60 percent – close to weapons grade – while refining the rest to levels that would make it suitable only for non-military use. But how that is done, by whom, and under what conditions and the evaluation process remain topics for more detailed discussions.
It is also unclear what will happen to Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium and its state-of-the-art centrifuges, machines that spin at high speeds to enrich material.
What is clear is that Iran’s scientific knowledge of the nuclear cycle is inexhaustible, that Iran has a history of building secret enrichment facilities hidden from international inspectors, and that the new hard-line Iranian government may believe it can prevent another attack by illegally developing a nuclear weapon.
Daniel B. Shapiro, the former US ambassador to Israel, said on social media that “there really is no deal, other than negotiating the HEU stockpile and the freeze on enrichment,” referring to highly enriched uranium.
“Iran knows how to pull out of those negotiations, and try to pocket concessions,” he continued. “It is likely that no agreement will ever be reached, and it is likely that if one is reached, it will be worse than what we could have achieved through diplomacy before the war.”
Robert Malley, who negotiated the 2015 Iran deal, echoed this sentiment. “Regarding the problems that will have to be solved after the MOU – the end of Iran’s nuclear program; the disposal of its enriched uranium; the scope of sanctions – will probably be left for later, and it will be more difficult to solve them than before the war,” he said on social media.
Criticism has been building about the deal even before it was officially signed, and the lack of clarity in some of the promises from each side, especially about whether Washington will agree to release some of Iran’s assets or remove some economic sanctions. And there is a deep well of mistrust between Washington and Tehran, not to mention between Iran and Israel, which is not directly involved in the negotiations.
Iran’s Foreign Ministry, for example, warned overnight that “entering into the 60-day talks is conditional on the US fulfilling these commitments,” which included “ending hostilities, removing sanctions, and releasing assets.”
Nate Swanson, director of the Iran Strategy Project at the Atlantic Council, a think tank, said that “the United States has not shown the patience necessary to conclude a complex nuclear agreement that requires new measures of monitoring and verification.”
Mr. Swanson added that Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, “may not want to do anything beyond a small, transactional deal with the United States, given Trump’s withdrawal from the Obama administration’s deal in 2018,” and the fact that the United States and Israel killed his father, wife, sister and one of his sons.
Iran has made it clear that it will insist on its right to enrich uranium, even after the moratorium, and that it intends to continue building missiles and support its proxy forces as much as possible, including Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in the Palestinian territories and the Houthis in Yemen. And it will be able to close the Strait of Hormuz again whenever it wants, and regardless of what it promises.
