 "Trump wants a ‘verified nuclear peace agreement’ with Iran. But how different it’d be from 2015 deal?")
In the latest episode of his topsy-turvy foreign policy, US President Donald Trump has offered Iran an opportunity to strike a deal with the United States — a day after imposing ‘maximum pressure’ sanctions and threatening to ‘obliterate’ Iran.
In a post on Truth Social, Trump said that he wants to have a “verified nuclear peace agreement” with Iran that also assures regional security.
Trump’s comments come at a time when Iran is at the threshold of developing a nuclear weapon — it has already enriched nuclear fuel uranium to near weapons-grade level . For more than a year, the US intelligence community had maintained that, once Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei gives his go-ahead, Iran may develop a nuclear weapon within 12-18 months. In recent months, however, the assessment has been revised to conclude that Iran is planning a faster, cruder weapon that can be developed within months.
On its part, Iran maintains that it suspended its nuclear weapons programme in 2003 and the current nuclear programme is completely for civilian purposes.
Such a revision in the assessment came in the wake of urgency felt in Iran. As Iran stands weaker than ever —allies Hamas and Hezbollah have been reduced a shadow of their former selves, ally Bashar al-Assad has been ousted in Syria, and Iran stands essentially naked as its aerial defences have been largely neutralised in aerial battles with Israel— top US officials have said that Khamenei may decide to develop a nuclear weapon to restore deterrence in the region as its conventional deterrence stands eroded.
Has Trump taken Iran negotiations back to square one?
This is the second time that Trump is seeking to strike a deal with Iran.
In his first term (2017-21), Trump withdrew the United States from the Iran nuclear deal, formally called the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), that the previous Barack Obama administration had signed with Iran in 2015. After the withdrawal, Trump ramped up sanctions on Iran as part of his maximum pressure strategy with the hope that increased pressure would force Iran into signing a deal favourable to the United States.
However, that strategy turned out to be a spectacular failure as instead of bringing Iran to a negotiating table, it pushed Iran to arrive at the threshold of developing a nuclear weapon.
Impact Shorts
More ShortsNow that Trump is seeking to reach an agreement with Iran, nearly eight years after breaking a previous agreement, it might appear that the progress of nearly a decade has been lost and he has taken the process back to square one. But there are some notable differences that could make a deal likelier and even better if it’s reached.
“In the 2015 agreement, regional partners like Israel and Saudi Arabia were kept completely out of the loop and that was a major criticism of the deal. With their exclusion, the question of regional security was not addressed by the deal. This time, Trump has indicated that he is looking at a deal that addresses twin challenges of the Iranian nuclear programme and regional security,” says Deepika Saraswat, a scholar of Iran at Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (MP-IDSA).
As Trump is also looking forward to negotiating a deal normalising the relationship between Israel and Saudi Arabia, the deal with Iran may very well be part of a larger Trump-led effort in West Asia.
Indeed, Trump in his Truth Social post said, “I would much prefer a verified nuclear peace agreement, which will let Iran peacefully grow and prosper. We should start working on it immediately, and have a big Middle East celebration when it is signed and completed. God bless the Middle East!”
What will be in Trump’s new Iran nuclear deal?
Trump has said that he wants a “verified nuclear peace agreement” with Iran that does not allow it to develop a nuclear weapon. That was exactly what the Iranian nuclear deal of 2015 was meant to do that Trump killed in his first term.
Contrary to the fearmongering of Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the 2015 deal was not a dud. It had capped the Iranian civilian nuclear programme in lieu of lifting sanctions, ruled out the nuclear weapon development, and the provision of inspections ensured transparency.
“The JCPOA was built on the foundation of verification, not mere trust, and it was working,” says Saraswat, an Associate Fellow at the West Asia Center at MP-IDSA.
Iran hawks criticised the deal over its ‘sunset’ clauses, so the deal that Trump has in mind now will likely have long-term or permanent provisions instead of the 10- or 15-year provisions that the JCPOA had.
Like all arms control treaties, there were time limits to JCPOA’s provisions. Critics said that such limitations —for example, the removal of nuclear fuel enrichment and stockpile caps in 2031 as well as the removal of restriction of civilian nuclear programme’s expansion— made the deal beneficial to Iran as it allowed Iran to buy time to make nuclear weapons.
Trump now has lessons from his first term and knows that maximalist demands may not work, so he may be more flexible in his engagement with Iran.
“Trump knows that the ‘maximum pressure’ approach has not worked. Even though the usage of the term stopped after his first term, the maximum pressure actually never went away. Sanctions remained in place. He knows little scope of achieving much by sanctions alone,” says Saraswat, the author of the book ‘Between Survival and Status: The Counter-hegemonic Geopolitics of Iran’.
Iran is seen weaker than ever — does that make deal easier?
Trump and Netanyahu are hopeful that a weakened Iran can be forced into a favourable deal, but Iran’s weakness is a double-edged sword.
“While you can say that you can force Iran into making a deal favourable to the United States and Israel as it stands weakened, the opposite may also be the case. As Iran stands weakest and the nuclear weapons’ leverage is all that it has, it can very well seek maximalist concessions to give up nuclear weapons. Iran’s status as a nuclear threshold state is much more valuable than being a nuclear state. It gives Iran substantial leverage,” says Saraswat.
The concessions that Iran may seek include permanent guarantees regarding the deal, such as legislative ratification by the United States and other signatories that would ensure that a future president could not walk out of the deal like Trump did in 2018.
Iran has already indicated that such a demand may be in the offing. Khamenei on Friday slammed the United States as an unreliable negotiating partner and flagged Trump’s past behaviour as a precaution for future engagement.
“The Americans did not uphold their end of the deal. The very person who is in office today [Trump] tore up the agreement. He said he would, and he did. This is an experience we must learn from. We negotiated, we gave concessions, we compromised but we did not achieve the results we aimed for. And despite all its flaws, the other side ultimately violated and destroyed the agreement,” said Khamenei.
Despite rhetoric against engagement with the United States and regarding the resumption of the nuclear weapons programme, it appears that Iran is looking for a deal as well as it is aware that a nuclear weapon will not be in its favour.
“If Iran acquires nuclear weapons, it may turn into North Korea. While Russia and China engage with Iran today, they may not engage if it has a nuclear weapon. Moreover, the Iranian nuclear bomb will trigger a regional arms race and it will be just a matter of time before Turkey and Saudi Arabia will have nuclear weapons as well. Neither Iran nor major powers supporting it would want that,” says Saraswat.
Moreover, if Iran goes ahead with the development of nuclear weapons, Trump and Netanyahu are bound to act militarily — Netanyahu has long flagged the Iranian nuclear weapon as an existential threat to Israel and has vowed to act with or without the United States to prevent its development .
Saraswat says, “The best-case scenario is a deal in which Iran gets sanctions lifted by leveraging its nuclear threshold status and Trump gets to boost regional security and that ties up with the broader regional initiative that he’s set to push, including the expansion of Abraham Accords.”
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