On Iran, Nuclear Dismantlement Must Be the Goal

National Review Online

Thursday, April 17, 2025

 

If nothing else, Donald Trump likes dealmaking, and the negotiations with Iran are particularly high stakes.

 

The administration is now engaged in talks with its Iranian counterparts — at times, indirectly via intermediaries and, at others, directly, with Trump envoy Steve Witkoff taking the lead in lengthy discussions with the Islamic Republic’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi.

 

Reporting indicates that Iran’s objectives in these talks are unambiguous. It hopes to secure an “interim agreement” with the United States that staves off the prospect of an attack on its nuclear program. It hopes to acquiesce only to limits on the rate at which it can enrich uranium — a temporary and reversible concession — that a pliant and gullible team of U.N. inspectors will monitor. In other words, Tehran wants Barack Obama’s 2015 nuclear deal back.

 

America’s goals are less clear. On Monday night, Witkoff told Fox News Channel host Sean Hannity that his focus would be on “the enrichment program” first, capping highly enriched uranium (HEU) refinement levels at 3.67 percent — the level required for civilian nuclear reactors.

 

He immediately walked back his statement the following morning. “A deal with Iran will only be completed if it is a Trump deal,” Witkoff wrote, using “Trump” as a synonym for “good.” He clarified that Washington believes “Iran must stop and eliminate its nuclear enrichment and weaponization program.”

 

Indeed, it must, because as long as Iran maintains a sophisticated array of advanced cascading centrifuges, there is nothing to prevent the Islamic Republic from enriching uranium past the civilian threshold to weapons grade.

 

Unfortunately, Iran is very unlikely to consent to the verifiable dismantling of its enrichment program. Nor can it be expected to back away from the production of multi-stage ballistic missiles or its support for its regional network of terrorist proxies, neither of which were addressed in the original Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) despite the GOP’s objections.

 

Still, Iran has plenty of reasons to negotiate. Its terrorist cat’s-paws Hamas and Hezbollah are seriously degraded. Its Houthi proxies in Yemen are being pummeled daily by U.S. air power. Its economy is being throttled again by U.S. sanctions, and its people are restless, weary, and exhausted with the tyranny under which they languish. The regime occupies a precarious place, and it clearly wants to make the most of the olive branch it has been offered by the Trump administration, if only to stall for time.

 

The Trump administration recognizes that risk. “We’re not going to get in the Biden trap,” U.S. Deputy Special Envoy to the Middle East Morgan Ortagus told Al Arabiya. Unlike negotiations with Joe Biden’s diplomats, in which the Iranians were “just stringing us along,” she said, these negotiations must “be quick” and productive.

 

Ortagus is right. The Iranians are responding to several inducements, foremost among them the staggering array of forces the United States has prepositioned in the Middle East. There are now two carrier strike groups in the region, a force posture augmented by the deployment of a fleet of B-2 stealth bombers, C-17 transport aircraft, and KC-135 refueling tankers as well as a suite of ordnance, like precision-guided Massive Ordnance Penetrators. This arsenal is tailor-made for a strike on the hardened, underground nuclear facilities that pepper the Iranian landscape.

 

This clear and present danger will concentrate the mullahs’ minds, but only for a limited time. This is an expensive deployment that cannot be maintained forever. Something will have to give.

 

If the Iranians prove recalcitrant or duplicitous, which would accord with past practice, Trump has to be prepared to pull the trigger, or support Israel if it does so. A window is open, with Iran’s air defenses significantly degraded, to attempt the neutralization of Iran’s nuclear capabilities.

 

There will be a natural temptation, though, to kick the can with a suboptimal nuclear deal, which would be a mistake. A JCPOA-style agreement that codifies Iran’s right to enrich uranium for civilian purposes sanctions Iran’s pathway to a bomb. Just ask Barack Obama. With “advanced centrifuges that can enrich uranium fairly rapidly,” he told NPR in 2015, “the breakout times would have shrunk almost down to zero.” Even if Iran were to de-enrich its current stockpile of HEU for the benefit of foreign audiences, it wouldn’t take much to restore it to weapons grade.

 

Worse still, the politics of the Iran deal that afflicted Democrats in the last decade would likely be adopted by the GOP. Pumping up the deal and defending it against critics would become more important than the merits of what it was supposed to achieve.

 

The Trump administration is right: Iran cannot be allowed to develop a functional nuclear weapon. Not only do Iranian ballistic missiles have the capacity to deliver such a payload to U.S. soil, the mere prospect of Iranian nuclearization is one that the Israelis cannot accept and will presumably go to war to prevent. Jerusalem has reason to greatly fear a millenarian regime with an eschatological worldview that has already demonstrated a willingness and ability to overwhelm Israeli air defenses and deliver warheads over its cities.

 

That’s why it is imperative that the administration get its negotiations with Iran right. If there is a “Trump deal” to be made here, one that results in the verifiable dismantling of Iran’s enrichment program and curbs its ballistic missile development and terrorist-funding programs, that would be a good thing. But the administration should be willing to admit failure if the talks don’t produce such an outcome and prepare for what comes next in the long confrontation between the Islamic Republic and the Western world.