In Iran Talks, Trump Is Edging Toward Reviving an Old Deal

The two sides set an agenda for additional negotiations in the coming days, which could include technical details on uranium enrichment.

Iran and the United States wrapped up a second round of diplomatic talks over Tehran’s nuclear activities on Saturday, setting an agenda for rapid-paced negotiations that, according to Iranian officials, would not require the dismantlement of the country’s extensive nuclear infrastructure.

Abbas Araghchi, Iran’s foreign minister, said after meeting Steve Witkoff, President Trump’s envoy, that an expert group would meet in the coming days to discuss technical details, including setting the maximum levels to which Iran could enrich uranium, the size of nuclear stockpiles it could retain and how compliance with any agreement could be monitored and verified.

But implicit in that description of the future negotiations was an assumption that President Trump would be willing to back down from the administration’s original insistence that all of Iran’s major nuclear sites and long-range missile arsenals must be subject to what Michael Waltz, Mr. Trump’s national security adviser, recently called “full dismantlement.”

The question of whether to allow Iran to retain the ability to produce nuclear fuel — with the risk that it could use it to create a bomb — has sharply divided Mr. Trump’s advisers. Those divisions have broken out in public in recent days, even as Mr. Witkoff, a real estate developer and friend of the president, was preparing for the talks that took place on Saturday at the residence of the Omani ambassador in Rome. Oman is acting as mediator in the talks.

Iran hawks in the administration, led by Mr. Waltz and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, have argued that it is far too risky to leave Iran with the ability to make its own nuclear fuel.

And agreeing to limits on how much uranium Iran can possess and how much enrichment it can perform exposes Mr. Trump to the critique that he is simply replicating key elements of the 2015 Obama-era nuclear agreement, which he called a “disaster” and ultimately ripped up in 2018.

Iranian officials have said that they will not disassemble or destroy the nuclear infrastructure in which they have invested billions of dollars. Mr. Witkoff has told administration officials privately that if they insist on full dismantlement, he is unlikely to emerge from the talks with a deal — the only way to avoid a military attack on Iran’s facilities, Mr. Trump has said. Israel has been pressing for military action against Iran’s nuclear sites, which would likely involve the United States.

Speaking after the talks ended, a senior administration official noted “very good progress in our direct and indirect discussions,” meaning that the parties spoke face to face as well as through their Omani host.

In private conversations leading up to the session, the Iranians told American officials that they were willing to reduce enrichment levels to those specified in the 2015 agreement struck with the Obama administration: 3.67 percent, the level needed to produce fuel for nuclear power plants.

Since Mr. Trump pulled out of that accord, Iran has been enriching to far higher levels of around 60 percent purity, just shy of what is needed to produce a nuclear weapon. That gives Tehran two options: race to produce weapons-grade fuel, or negotiate with the United States to return to the original levels in the 2015 accord.

But that second option would expose Mr. Trump to the critique that after declaring the decade-old agreement a “disaster” and scrapping it, he is getting nothing better.

“What’s happening in Rome and Oman, in an irony of ironies, is the resurrection of something looking pretty close” to the agreement Mr. Obama approved, and that Mr. Trump disparaged, said Aaron David Miller of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

It may be the best Mr. Trump can get.

Mr. Witkoff paved the way for such an agreement, describing in an interview on Tuesday a possible agreement that would essentially allow Iran to produce fuel at low levels, with careful inspection and monitoring. But he was forced to backtrack. He then posted on social media that the U.S. position was that “Iran must stop and eliminate its nuclear enrichment and weaponization program.” The key word was “eliminate.”

Mr. Witkoff did not speak immediately after the negotiations — the second round in two weeks — ended on Saturday afternoon in Rome. Oman said those technical negotiations would take place in Muscat, its capital, in the coming days.

When pressed this week on whether the United States could live with Iran having a limited nuclear-enrichment capability, American officials dodged the question, saying only that Mr. Trump had vowed that Iran would not be permitted to have a nuclear weapon.

Mr. Witkoff will now have to brief Mr. Trump and his administration colleagues about the latest round of talks. Officials familiar with the internal debate say that Mr. Waltz and Mr. Rubio, both of whom were harsh critics of the Obama-era deal when they served in Congress, remain opposed to leaving Iran with any nuclear production capability.

On Friday, Mr. Rubio said that any deal must keep Iran from ever possessing a nuclear weapon. “It has to be something that not just prevents Iran from having a nuclear weapon now, but in the future as well,” he told reporters on a trip to Paris.

Mr. Trump himself has been vague about the strategic objectives of the negotiations, other than to repeat that Iran must never get a bomb — a declaration that avoids the critical question of whether the United States can live with an Iran that is a “threshold state,” able to produce a weapon on short notice.

Ali Vaez, the Iran director of the International Crisis Group, said that talks advancing to the technical phase showed a level of pragmatism, suggesting that the discussion of dismantling Iran’s nuclear program was mostly public posturing.

Iran has raised the possibility of a joint venture to run its nuclear enrichment facilities, an option that would allow the Trump administration to declare it has struck a different kind of deal than the Obama administration did.

It is unclear if the United States or a third country, preferably one of Iran’s Arab neighbors in the Persian Gulf, would be the partner, offering an extra layer of assurance that its program is peaceful, according to Mr. Vaez and a senior Iranian official familiar with the discussions. The official declined to be named because of the sensitivity of the talks.

The concept of an Iranian nuclear program that is a joint venture with either Arab countries or the U.S., Mr. Vaez said, “creates an extra layer of eyes and ears on the ground to safeguard the peaceful nature of its nuclear program.”

The senior Iranian official also said that Iran was open to transferring its stockpile of enriched uranium to Russia or another nation, much as it did in early 2016 as the Obama-era deal went into effect. Iran has since dramatically increased the size of that stockpile, and has enough 60 percent enriched material to make upwards of six nuclear bombs if it chooses to weaponize the material.

(Unlike the 2015 negotiations, France, Germany, Britain, Russia and China have been frozen out of these talks.)

Mr. Araghchi told Iranian media traveling with him in Rome that the Americans had not brought up any other issue outside of the nuclear program. “We have told them our negotiations is about the nuclear issue, and we will not discuss anything else,” he said.

Hamid Aboutalebi, a former diplomat and political adviser to former President Hassan Rouhani, said in an interview from Tehran that it was a positive sign that talks were moving forward, but that many challenges remained before an agreement could be reached.

“The real challenge isn’t the technical details; we did negotiate these details before,” Mr. Aboutalebi said. “The issue is staying power. Without a stable political and diplomatic foundation, even the most meticulous technical agreement won’t hold.”

Iranian media and some conservative pundits posted a photo of miniature Iranian and U.S. flags side by side on a table, a departure from the typical burning and stomping of the American flag that has become a staple of demonstrations by government supporters.

Leily Nikounazar contributed reporting from Brussels, and Emma Bubola from Rome.

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