Is Trump’s planned Iran nuclear deal on the verge of collapse?
“Who are you to tell us whether we should have a nuclear program or not?” declared Iran’s supreme leader today, in comments directed at President Trump that suggest Tehran is on the brink of rejecting the US proposal for a nuclear agreement.
In his first public remarks since Washington proposed the outline of a deal over the weekend, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei labelled the Trump administration “rude and arrogant”, effectively rejecting its key demand: “We won’t stop enriching uranium”, he insisted. To do so would be “100 percent” against Tehran’s interests.
Khamenei labelled it “useless” for Iran to build nuclear power plants without being able to enrich uranium over the long-term, framing the US proposal as an attempt to obstruct the country’s self-reliance.
Enrichment of Uranium-235, which is used to make both nuclear reactor fuel but also nuclear weapons, is at the heart of the five recent rounds of tense negotiations between the US and Iran, mediated by Oman.
Iran says it is enriching uranium for peaceful civilian purposes while the US believes this is a cover for building nuclear weapons. According to a UN nuclear watchdog, Iran has increased its stockpile of uranium enriched to near-weapons grade by about 50 per cent since February.
Washington is still awaiting a formal Iranian response to its draft proposal for a new nuclear deal, presented to Tehran by the Omani foreign ministry on Saturday.
It’s unclear exactly what the US proposal demands of Tehran. Some reports, citing two anonymous officials, suggest that Washington has proposed allowing Iran to temporarily continue enriching uranium at low levels under an interim deal, before later halting it. Other reports indicate that it has called for Iran to completely halt the the enrichment of uranium on domestic soil, instead relying on a regional consortium for supplies to power its civil nuclear program.
Khamenei did not say that Iran is halting negotiations with the US and his public comments today shouldn’t be taken completely at face value since they will be part of a wider negotiating tactic. Even so, they hardly inspire confidence in the progress made during these five rounds of negotiations. Which begs the question: what happens if the talks break down?
These negotiations, proposed by Trump, were an attempt by the US President to prioritise diplomacy over the military action, which Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and some of Trump’s own top officials, were pushing for him to take.
The possibility of Israeli or joint US-Israeli strikes on Iran’s nuclear sites looms large if the talks collapse. That in turn could see Iran launch reprisals.
In late May, both Axios and CNN reported that American intelligence agencies believe Israel is readying to strike Iran unilaterally if the talks fail. The reports said that intercepted Israeli communications and the monitoring of the movement of munitions indicated preparations for an attack.
Though, as Tim Marshall pointed out in Reaction at the time, it’s also possible that the Americans were deliberately leaking potentially bellicose behaviour to pressure the Iranians to make concessions on nuclear enrichment.
Regardless, as Tim also warns, if the US-Iran talks collapse, the world enters an even more dangerous period.
Caitlin Allen
Deputy Editor
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