American and Iranian diplomats are talking again about Tehran’s nuclear program and Washington’s economic sanctions, seeing if there might be some way to clamp down on the former and loosen the latter.
On the whole, this is good news. Iran’s labs are now enriching uranium to the point where they could build a couple of atom bombs very quickly, a development that could provoke Israel or the United States to launch an attack, which could trigger war. Meanwhile, the sanctions are inflicting harm on the Iranian people without weakening the mullahs’ government in the slightest.
No one should mistake these new talks as presaging a revival of the Iran nuclear deal, the accord that President Obama and the leaders of five other nations reached with Iran in 2015 and that President Trump abrogated three years later. That deal is dead, and the chances of renewed negotiations on a new deal are dim as well.
However, informal discussions, we now know, have been going on for six months, with the aim of settling into an arrangement that—without demanding many commitments or compromises, much less signing a treaty—might cool tensions and brake the momentum toward armed conflict.
In a little-noted speech back on May 4, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said that the Biden administration was “engaging Iran diplomatically regarding its nuclear program.” Just last Sunday, at an exhibition of Iran’s nuclear wares, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei seemed to acknowledge the engagement, saying that while he would not agree to the dismantling of Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, it might be permissible to “make some deals in some areas—it is not a problem.”
What happened in between those two pronouncements—Sullivan’s and Khamenei’s—illustrates the political minefield greeting Biden, mainly in Congress but perhaps throughout the Middle East, for attempting to bring up even a pale version of the Iran nuclear deal.
The story begins, as we only recently learned, back in late 2022, when Robert Malley, Biden’s Iran envoy, met in New York with Tehran’s U.N. ambassador about resuming some sort of talks about nukes and sanctions. In early April, still a month before Sullivan’s speech, Barak Ravid, Tel Aviv correspondent for Axios, reported that Biden officials had consulted European and Israeli officials about a possible “freeze for freeze” deal, in which Iran stops enriching uranium and the U.S. lifts a small number of sanctions and imposes no new ones. On May 30, Ravid reported that Brett McGurk, Biden’s senior Middle East adviser, had traveled to Oman to discuss a possible overture to Tehran, using Omani diplomats as middlemen.
Much of this was officially dismissed as mere rumor, until June 8, when the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported, as a banner headline put it: “Major Progress Made in Nuclear Talks Between U.S. and Iran in Preparation for a New Agreement.”
The next day, Laura Rozen, one of the most astute American chroniclers of U.S.-Iran relations, reported in her Substack column that the Axios and Haaretz stories were products of deliberate (and somewhat exaggerated) leaks from Israeli officials meant to “scuttle” any revival of diplomacy—even toward a limited deal—between Washington and Tehran.
Though many Israeli military and intelligence officers viewed the Iran nuclear deal as preferable to no deal at all, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu saw it as a major threat and played a major role in persuading Trump to pull out of it—and in persuading a bipartisan majority in Congress to oppose it as well. Biden is also in the process of making amends with Saudi Arabia, mainly to keep oil prices (and therefore Russian revenue from oil prices) down. The Saudis, along with other Sunni leaders, are suspicious of any overtures that might help Iran. Thus a leak about negotiations, before they bore any fruit, could spur a backlash on several levels, at several locales, grinding any talks to a halt.
The deal under discussion is not nearly as wide-ranging as the 2015 deal, which was formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). Under the JCPOA, Iran agreed to dismantle nearly all of its nuclear infrastructure and to open suspect sites to intrusive inspection. In exchange, the U.S. would lift most of its economic sanctions against the Islamic Republic. In the three years that the deal was in effect, the International Atomic Energy Agency reported that Tehran was in compliance with the terms and schedule of the accord.
Under the new arrangement, if both sides nail it down, Iran would stop enriching uranium beyond current levels, stop its proxies from attacking American contractors in Syria and Iraq, allow international inspectors back into nuclear sites, free three American-Iranian prisoners, and—a significant move in another war zone—stop selling ballistic missiles to Russia. In exchange, the U.S. would refrain from tightening sanctions, stop seizing foreign tankers carrying Iranian oil, and unlock some of Iran’s frozen bank assets, though only for humanitarian purposes. (The money would go through vetted companies to make sure it’s not diverted elsewhere.)
One objection to even this deal is that Iran has enriched some uranium to 60 percent purity. If it were to enrich it further to 90 percent (the level known as “weapons-grade”), it would have enough to build two atomic bombs. And it would take only two weeks for Iranian scientists to boost the uranium from 60 to 90 percent enriched. Opponents of the deal say Iran is too close to weapons-grade to justify any sort of sanctions-lifting in exchange. Advocates of the deal note that it would take Iran another year or two to turn the enriched uranium into an actual weapon that could fit on a missile’s warhead. They also note that the JCPOA prohibited Iran from enriching uranium beyond 3 percent. In other words, we would not be in this predicament if Trump hadn’t scuttled the JCPOA.
The tension is mounting because both Biden and Netanyahu, however much they disagree on many things, have proclaimed they will never allow Iran to build a nuclear weapon. Yet if Iran is allowed to keep enriching uranium at the current rate, it will develop weapons-grade uranium in the near future—and some will regard that point as crossing a red line. (Biden has not made clear what he sees as a red line—crossing 90-percent purity or turning the material into a weapon.)
Both the U.S. and Iran, along with their Omani intermediaries, at least say they want to stay clear of this line, however it’s defined. We will see in the next few months whether the political pressures—in Washington, Tehran, and Jerusalem—will allow some restraint to take hold.