Over the last week, Iran hardliners in Washington have issued dire warnings about the Trump administration’s launching of nuclear talks with Iran. Iranian leaders, one such analyst argued, will “exploit these different negotiating positions…as soon as the regime smells desperation.” This warning is certainly valid. Indeed, it is more than a little embarrassing that the White House’s lead negotiator, Special Envoy Steven Witkoff, stated on April 14 that “Iran does not need to enrich past 3.67 percent,” contradicting the “zero enrichment” position that National Security Advisor Michael Waltz and other administration hawks have advocated, only to declare on April 15 that “Iran must…eliminate its nuclear enrichment and weaponization program.”
And yet, the crux of the problem is not Iran’s perception of desperation in the White House. Rather, the key issue is that the administration must choose between two starkly different options. The first option is a negotiated agreement based on a minimal level of uranium enrichment carried out in Iran under strict monitoring controls for an extended period, in return for major sanctions relief. The second is launching a military assault in a bid to destroy Iran’s nuclear program. The choice is thus between war or a deal.
Washington hardliners and their Israeli allies, not least of whom is Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, want war. Worried that President Donald Trump might reject their stance, these hardliners have been busy propelling the very fractious debate about the possibility of a deal with Iran. Nevertheless, press reports from multiple sources (including in Iran and Israel) suggest that the April 19 indirect talks between Witkoff and Iranian negotiators made real progress. As the chances for a “framework agreement” may be growing, what must be considered are not only the risks and benefits of a deal. What must also be considered is whether the president and his advisors have any idea how to fit such a deal into a US larger strategy for the region that would include the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and other issues.
Potential Risks of a Deal
A deal with Iran would carry risks that could accumulate over time. Tehran might cheat by hiding uranium and plutonium enrichment activities (as it has done in the past) or by accelerating its enrichment as it approaches whatever end date is set for an extensive monitoring system the United States and international community puts in place. Although the White House will probably push for an agreement to make permanent any system of limited enrichment and intrusive inspections, Iran is likely to resist such demands. Moreover, because Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and his allies in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps have rejected including the issue of Iran’s ballistic missile system in talks with the United States, without a separate agreement on this crucial issue, Tehran will continue to develop a missile delivery capacity that Israel and Iran’s Arab neighbors will have reason to fear.
Major sanctions relief could give Tehran space and means to start to rebuild the “axis of resistance.”
Moreover, major sanctions relief could give Tehran space and means to start to rebuild the “axis of resistance” that suffered a near fatal blow in 2024 from Israel’s assault on Hezbollah and its reported destruction of the majority of Iran’s air defenses and Tehran’s loss of its vital regional ally, the Assad regime, in Syria. With Syria now ruled by a Sunni Islamist president who is distancing his country from Assad’s ally Russia, what Iran needs is time and resources. A nuclear deal that includes real sanctions relief that is accepted by Iran might provide both.
Potential Benefits of a Deal
Yet a deal could also bring significant benefits, even for those countries (including Israel and especially the United States) that will continue to face a formidable and untrustworthy foe in Iran. A deal would undercut Iran’s hardliners while opening more space for reformists. In their efforts over the last year to further entrench their already considerable power in advance of the inevitable battle over who will succeed the elderly Khamenei, Iranian hardliners have run into obstacles, including an economy in meltdown and a tricky “no peace/no war” strategy that has been wrecked by the severe weakening of the axis of resistance. This development has certainly bolstered the reformists.
But a revival of the reformists’ fortunes is unlikely to lead to liberal democracy in Iran. Still, it could foster a domestic power shift that promotes political decompression at home and a fresh approach to a new wide engagement abroad. And while the March 2 resignation of former foreign minister Javad Zarif from his vice presidential post signals the hardliners’ enduring influence, a deal could still help President Masoud Pezeshkian’s outreach to more mainstream conservatives, thus widening his de facto coalition even as he retains the support of the Supreme Leader. Fearing that reformists will use an agreement to enhance their domestic position, hardliners will surely try to wreck a deal with Washington. Yet any such effort would attest to the extremely high domestic stakes that are now at play as Iran’s leaders wrestle with what will be a fundamental choice.
Moreover, a deal might mitigate the dangers for Iran itself that would accompany any bid to create an effective nuclear weapons option. Although US intelligence sources say that the Islamic Republic has enough enriched uranium for one nuclear bomb—and according to some reports enough for four or five more—there are still complex steps (such as testing) that Iran must take to build a comprehensive system with “second strike” capacity to deter an Israeli assault. While estimates vary as to how long it would take Iran to build such a system, any effort to move in this direction may provoke a massive attack by the United States and Israel. This is the last thing Iran wants.
Iran and the United States have been drawn together by their mutual desire to prevent a wider regional conflict.
Indeed, recent press reports suggest that Israel was preparing to launch such an attack, and hoping for US assistance, as soon as May 2025, but was prevented from doing so by Trump. Paradoxically, Iran and the United States have been drawn together by their mutual desire to prevent a wider regional conflict that could have multiple costs, not least of which is halting tanker traffic in the Red Sea and in the Strait of Hormuz. With some twenty percent of oil and gas exports still flowing through the Strait—and with Trump’s tariff policy causing global economic turmoil—a no-deal scenario could propel the United States, Israel, and Iran into a sustained military conflict that would set the stage for an international economic crisis. In short, a deal would give Iran a much-needed exit ramp from a perilous path that its own accelerated enrichment program has helped to create.
Finally, US military experts have questioned whether any such Israeli-US attack would permanently destroy Iran’s nuclear program. While it would set it back for some years, it could also set the stage for Iran to exit the Nuclear Proliferation Treaty and rebuild its nuclear program without the constraints of any international system of controls and inspections. Such a development could trigger a conventional and even a nuclear arms race with many of its Arab neighbors (including Saudi Arabia, whose defense minister visited Tehran and met with Ayatollah Khamenei on April 19 in what was an unprecedented meeting for the two states). In the wake of an American-Israeli attack, Iranian hardliners would surely seize control of the state and, in the name of national security, might create a Middle East version of North Korea that would isolate Iran not only from its neighbors, but also from Russia and especially China. This is a road that few Iranian leaders, including hardliners, appear eager to travel.
Israel’s Government and Its US Allies Have No Plan Other Than War
Writing for his Substack newsletter, “Clarity,” former Israeli ambassador to the United States Michael Oren argued that in the wake of the ongoing US-Iran talks, Israel must address one overriding question: what it can do “now that an Israeli military option appears definitively off the table, while U.S. and Iranian envoys are negotiating a new nuclear deal?” His answer is that Israel must “prepare for the worst” by securing an “ironclad U.S. security guarantees and assurances that we will always have the means to defend ourselves against Iranian aggression. We must, for the first time, be permitted to purchase strategic bombers and train our crews to fly them.”
In his quest to survive in power, Netanyahu is strengthening Israel’s own Ayatollahs.
This is a remarkable statement that underscores Israel’s failure to use its extensive military might to back a diplomatic regional and global strategy that would have the support of the United States, Europe, and perhaps even Russia and China. Israel, as experts Aaron David Miller and Steven Simon recently argued in the New York Times, may now be the regional hegemon. But in projecting its military might in Iran, Lebanon, Syria, and most of all in Gaza, Israel has also advanced the goals of messianic Jewish supremacist parties that, like their counterparts in Iran, want to impose a theocracy on a pluralistic society. That their prospects for success have reached new heights owes much to Prime Minister Netanyahu. In his quest to survive in power, he is not only strengthening Israel’s own Ayatollahs. He also is creating a hegemonic project designed to impose permanent occupation over three million Palestinians in the West Bank, and perhaps permanent displacement of another two million in Gaza.
A US-Iran Agreement Is No Substitute for a Coherent US Strategy
Trump might very well embrace this version of Israeli hegemony. But he is unlikely to provide all the weapons that Oren insists Israel must have. And yet the US president’s resistance to giving Netanyahu the “bunker busting” munitions Israel may need to destroy Iran’s deepest nuclear facilities does not suggest any wider vision of how to deal with the region. A prisoner of his ignorance and impulses, beyond sustaining the Abraham Accords between Israel, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Morocco and expanding them to include Saudi Arabia, Trump appears to have no larger plan than trying to keep the United States from deeper military engagement in the Middle East. But as his recent decision to withdraw as many as half of US troops in Syria just as the so-called Islamic State is expanding suggests, he may have to contend with a region that drifts into chaos and forces him to change course and even to take military steps that could invite the very wider regional conflict that he apparently is trying to avoid.
If certainly preferable to the black hole of regional war, a nuclear deal with Iran is no substitute for a coherent US strategy that includes a new position on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the American approach to human rights and accountable governance in the region, and US troops in the Gulf, among other things. The dangers of a policy based on improvisation were amply displayed by Trump’s predecessor. But one thing that distinguishes him from Joe Biden is that Trump does not care in any serious emotional or intellectual way for any Middle East country, including Israel. Like Israeli premier Netanyahu, what counts most for Trump is his quest to secure near unlimited personal power. Iran’s leaders may grasp this fact and thus may be willing to indulge his desire to get at least one “win” to get a deal—to the chagrin of hardline leaders and analysts in Israel and Washington. But the proponents of war may yet get the battle they have long championed, even if the foreign policy infighting in the White House briefly abates to allow for some version of the very compromise that Barack Obama negotiated with Iran in 2015 and that Trump repudiated later in 2018.
The views expressed in this publication are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the position of Arab Center Washington DC, its staff, or its Board of Directors.
Featured image credit: Tasnim News/Mostafa Tehrani; Shutterstock/Noam Galai
