While the president of United States, donald trumpstruggle to negotiate or intimidate a way out of the war that started with the Iranhe is facing the complicated legacy of his decision, made eight years ago, to cancel what he called “a horrible, one-sided deal.”
This agreement of the era Barack Obama had flaws and omissions. It would expire after 15 years, leaving Iran free after 2030 to produce as much nuclear fuel as it wants. But, when Trump withdrew from the agreement in 2018the Iranians began an enrichment run much earlier, leaving them closer to a bomb than ever before.
Now, Trump’s negotiators are dealing with the fallout from that decision, which he made over the objections of many of his national security advisers at the time. Underscoring the challenges, Trump on Saturday abruptly called off a round of nuclear talks with Iran in Pakistan.
Much of the recent attention has focused on Iran’s half-ton of uranium that has been enriched to a level just below that typically used in atomic bombs. Most of it is believed to be buried in a tunnel complex that Trump bombed in June last year. But those 440 kilograms of potential bomb fuel represent only a fraction of the problem.
Today, international inspectors say, Iran has a total of 11 tons of uranium, at various levels of enrichment. With additional purification, this is enough to build up to a hundred nuclear weapons—more than the estimated size of the nuclear arsenal. Israel.
Virtually all of this stockpile accumulated in the years after Trump abandoned the Obama-era deal. This is because Tehran fulfilled its promise in the agreement to send Russia 12.5 tonnes of its total stock, around 97%. Iran’s weapons designers were left with insufficient nuclear fuel to build a single bomb.
Now, equal or overcome this diplomatic achievement It is one of the most complex challenges facing Trump and his two top negotiators, his son-in-law Jared Kushner and his special envoy, Steve Witkoff, whose planned trip to Pakistan for another negotiating session was canceled at the last minute by Trump.
At the center of the negotiations is the United States’ demand that Iran stop further enrichment and hand over the fuel stockpile accumulated over the last eight years; Iran resists on both counts.
