As Iran and the United States negotiate a formula to strictly limit Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for lifting crushing economic sanctions, their positions over uranium enrichment are widely conflicting.
Iran, which has invested billions of dollars in uranium enrichment, calls it a “national achievement” for peaceful purposes that will continue.
On Wednesday it appeared to reject the latest U.S. proposal, which reportedly would eventually relocate the enrichment program outside Iran’s borders.
Why We Wrote This
Even as Washington and Tehran grapple with each other’s nuclear red lines, one Iranian analyst explains why the simple fact of engagement between the sworn enemies underscores a pragmatic turn for Iran regarding President Donald Trump.
“Enemies have concentrated their efforts on our uranium enrichment,” supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said in a speech posted to his official feed on the social platform X. “A nuclear industry without enrichment capabilities is useless, because we would then be dependent on others to obtain fuel for our power plants.”
Yet even as the U.S. and Iran grapple with each other’s red lines in indirect talks mediated by Oman, the simple fact of engagement between the sworn enemies underscores a pragmatic, if dissonant, turn for Iran regarding President Donald Trump, who elicits particular ire in the Islamic Republic.
With the election last July of reform-leaning Masoud Pezeshkian as president, “The entire discourse within Iran has changed on the United States,” says Hassan Ahmadian, an assistant professor of Middle East and North Africa studies at Tehran University.
“You could say, ‘Why talk with Trump, who did all the bad stuff and experience in the past?’” he says. But for Mr. Pezeshkian’s team, “Personality doesn’t so much matter,” Dr. Ahmadian adds. “Lifting of sanctions is front and center.
“It’s not ideal to deal with Trump, but that is secondary. What matters is to lift sanctions through engagement, and that is the core of the diplomatic approach.”
Trump’s Iran record
Nevertheless, “Death to America!” is still chanted at official rallies in Iran and echoes from the audience whenever Ayatollah Khamenei speaks. The words even emanate from fist-pumping Iranian lawmakers in parliament.
In Mr. Trump’s first term in 2018, he pulled the U.S. out of what he called the “worst ever” 2015 nuclear deal Tehran had reached with world powers, even though Iran had adhered to its restrictions.
He imposed “maximum-pressure” sanctions on Iran, and in 2020 ordered the assassination of Iran’s most revered military commander, Brig. Gen. Qassem Soleimani, in a drone strike in Baghdad.
Iran says it is willing to dramatically scale back its advanced nuclear program, even to levels agreed in the 2015 deal, if it receives guarantees on parallel sanctions relief. Mr. Trump said last week he would insist on an agreement under which “We can take whatever we want; we can blow up whatever we want.”
A U.S. proposal over the weekend reportedly allows Iran to continue enriching at low levels until a carefully monitored regional consortium could be built, probably within a few years, to enrich nuclear fuel for local participants, such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
The U.S. insists that this consortium be located outside Iran, and that Iran would then have to halt its own enrichment. Iranian officials are open to the consortium idea, but only if it is based in Iran.
Mr. Trump, meanwhile, has repeatedly threatened to use military force against Iran if no deal is reached.
“A few years ago, one of the U.S. presidents said he would dismantle the nuts and bolts of Iran’s nuclear industry if he could,” Ayatollah Khamenei said Wednesday. “Those in power today – the Zionists and the Americans – should know that they can’t do a damn thing in this area.”
A shift in mindset
Yet such rhetoric masks a change in Iran, analysts say, which began a year ago, after Iran’s hard-line President Ebrahim Raisi died in a helicopter crash. As a candidate to succeed Mr. Raisi, Mr. Pezeshkian promised to speak to “anyone” if it were in Iran’s interests – a signal that Iran’s leadership recognized that Mr. Raisi’s tactics had failed to lift sanctions.
Dr. Ahmadian, the professor, notes that Mr. Raisi had made some progress with U.S. negotiators under President Joe Biden to restore the 2015 deal, called the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), but was “less flexible.”
“The new president is of a different mindset,” says Dr. Ahmadian. “His team is the team that negotiated the JCPOA. He chose this team because he wanted to resolve this standoff.”
Majid Asgaripour/West Asia News Agency/Reuters
The deal Iran struck with world powers in 2015 limited Iran’s enrichment to 3.67% purity – enough to produce fuel for power plants, but far from the 90% purity required to make a nuclear weapon. Iran now enriches to 60%, which is a simple technical step away from weapons-grade.
Iran has amassed enough enriched material to make some 10 nuclear devices if it chose to, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency.
Mr. Trump on Monday appeared to rule out Iranian enrichment in a post on Truth Social. Iran should have been stopped from enriching “a long time ago,” he wrote. He added that, under the potential agreement, “WE WILL NOT ALLOW ANY ENRICHMENT OF URANIUM!”
Similar U.S. positions date back more than 20 years, but until the 2015 nuclear deal, they never slowed Iran’s nuclear progress.
The U.S. was making “excessive and outrageous demands,” Mr. Khamanei said in a speech May 20. “Saying they will not allow Iran to enrich is a big mistake. No one waits for their permission.”
U.S. investment opportunity?
Mr. Trump has said a deal would be “great” for Iran and avoid a costly war. Iran, in turn, has taken a leaf from the Gulf Arab states in their dealings with the president, and suggested that the Islamic Republic is a “trillion-dollar opportunity” ripe for American investment.
“Having defense capabilities, having regional influence, is part of any engagement with the U.S.,” says Dr. Ahmadian. “From the outside, it might look a bit contradictory. But the way Iranians view it, it’s two sides of the same coin: You have some levels of deterrence, and you have some cards that you are willing to trade. And these two are going in parallel.”
The core of the matter is not ideological, he says, despite decades of flag-burning and official calls for the death of America.
“When the [2015] nuclear deal was signed, those voices were very much weakened within Iran,” says Dr. Ahmadian. “It took Trump pulling out of the deal, and putting ‘maximum pressure’ again on Iran, for that to come to the fore even more than before. So I don’t see that as part of the problem.”
