President Trump says the agreement he reached with Iran could end the war he started and ensure that the country will never have a nuclear weapon. Iran has promised not to develop one, a promise it has made before, including in the nuclear deal reached with the Obama administration that Mr. Trump ripped up.
But the details on the future of Iran’s nuclear program have not been settled. Those issues will be negotiated in the 60 days after two sides are scheduled to sign the agreement on Friday.
The text of the accord has not been released and both sides are spinning their versions of the it, making it difficult to know precisely what Iran has promised. For example, Iran has in principle agreed to suspend enriching uranium for some years, but the two sides have yet to agree on how long that will be.
In a telephone interview with The New York Times on Sunday, Mr. Trump admitted that a consensus had not been reached. He wants Iran to stop enriching for 20 years; Iran reportedly wants no more than a decade.
The president hinted that he might settle for a 15-year suspension but was also adamant that Iran would be limited to enriching at low levels that “could never be used by the military.” But he declined to say what that enrichment level would be, and whether it would be the same as the 3.67 percent purity — enough for civilian use only — laid out in the 2015 nuclear deal signed by former President Barack Obama that Mr. Trump abandoned in 2018, calling it the worst deal in history. He said only that the new accord would assure that “they can only enrich for nonmilitary purposes. Forever.”
If it really is “forever,” that would be an improvement on the 2015 deal, which had time limits attached to it.
Iran has also agreed to give up half of its 440 kilograms of uranium enriched to 60 percent — near weapons grade — while diluting the other half to levels that would make it only applicable for nonmilitary uses. But how that is done, by whom, and under what auspices and inspection routine remain subjects for further detailed negotiations.
It is also unclear what will happen to the rest of Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium and its sophisticated centrifuges, the machines that spin at supersonic speed to enrich the material.
What is clear is that Iran’s scientific knowledge of the nuclear cycle cannot be eliminated, that Iran has a history of building secret enrichment facilities hidden from international inspectors, and that a new, more hard-line Iranian government may believe that it can only deter another attack by illicitly working toward a nuclear weapon.
Daniel B. Shapiro, a former American ambassador to Israel, said on social media that “there really is no agreement, other than to negotiate over the HEU stockpile and an enrichment moratorium,” referring to highly enriched uranium.
“Iran knows how to drag out those negotiations, and try to pocket concessions along the way,” he continued. “It is possible that no deal will ever be reached, and very 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 with Iran on the 2015 deal, echoed this idea. “As for the issues that will have to be addressed after the MOU — the fate of Iran’s nuclear program; the disposition of its enriched uranium; the scope of sanctions relief — they almost certainly will be left for later, and will almost certainly be harder to resolve than prior to the war,” he said on social media.
Criticism is already building about the agreement even before it has officially been signed, with a lack of clarity on some of each side’s promises, especially about whether Washington will agree to unfreeze some Iranian assets or lift some economic sanctions. And there is a deep well of mistrust between Washington and Tehran, let alone between Iran and Israel, which is not directly involved in the negotiations.
Iran’s foreign ministry, for example, warned overnight that “entering 60-day negotiations is conditional upon U.S. fulfilling these commitments,” which it listed as “ending war, lifting blockade, and releasing assets.”
Nate Swanson, director of the Iran Strategy Project at the Atlantic Council, a think tank, said that “the United States hasn’t shown the patience necessary to complete a complicated nuclear deal that requires new monitoring and verification measures.”
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 Khamenei’s father, mother, wife, and son.”
Iran has made it clear that it will insist on its right to enrich uranium, even after a period of suspension, and that it intends to keep building ballistic missiles and supporting its proxy forces as best it can, including Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in the Palestinian territories and the Houthis in Yemen. And it will also be capable of shutting down the Strait of Hormuz again whenever it likes, and no matter what it promises.
