President Donald Trump has long presented himself as a genius negotiator who has mastered the “art of the deal.” But his latest comments about what he hopes to achieve in talks with Iran show how the most basic principles of deal-making elude him.
Fox News anchor Sean Hannity asked the president on Thursday about whether the U.S. was considering the options of seizing Iran’s estimated stockpile of 970 pounds of highly enriched uranium, which can be enriched slightly further to make nuclear bombs, by force or whether the U.S. would try to “entomb it” and make it impossible for Iran to access.
Trump’s surprise admission is exactly the kind of statement that Iranian negotiators will take note of.
Trump first said that if the U.S. tried to seize the stockpile, it would take “a week and a half” to extract using a ground operation. That is likely an underestimate; nuclear experts say such an operation would take weeks, and that’s assuming it goes smoothly.
But what Trump said next was a surprise.
“I don’t think it’s necessary [to get the uranium], except from a public relations standpoint,” the president said. “I think it’s important for the fake news that we get it.”
He added, “I’m the one that said we’re going to get it, and we’re going to get it. We have our eye on it.”
In just a handful of words — “I don’t think it’s necessary” — Trump appeared to abandon a position that has been central to his entire premise for this disastrous war. And he instantly undermined his insistence on it as a key term of a peace deal with Iran.
That insistence — that Iran cannot secure nuclear weapons — was the overarching rationale for his war of aggression. Iran’s nearly 1,000 pound stockpile is enriched to 60% — just shy of the enrichment levels required to make nuclear weapons. Experts estimate that if Iran were to try to use the stockpile to make weapons, it could create some 10 to 12 nuclear bombs. (And Iran has a lot more uranium enriched at lower levels that could also potentially be used to make a weapon in the future.)
Notably, U.S. intelligence assessments have estimated that the joint U.S.-Israeli bombardment campaign has failed to set back Iran’s nuclear capabilities. After Iran took control of the Strait of Hormuz and caused a global oil shock, Trump was forced to try to dismantle Iran’s nuclear capabilities at the negotiating table instead. In his negotiations and in conversations with the press about the negotiations, Trump has consistently identified the handover of Iran’s uranium stockpile as a core demand for a resolution to the war.
But now it appears that isn’t a prerequisite to end the war. When Trump told Hannity that “I don’t think it’s necessary” to get the enriched uranium, he suggested he has a soft commitment to it. And then, bafflingly, he attempted to pass it off as a “public relations” maneuver to satisfy the media. The takeaway is that Trump appears to be repackaging a key plank of his negotiation position as window dressing.
Trump’s surprise admission is exactly the kind of statement that Iranian negotiators will take note of, and use to bolster their confidence in negotiations. If they know Trump is ambivalent about — and could perhaps eventually become indifferent to — removal of Iran’s stockpile, that gives Iran more of an incentive to refuse to budge on that element of the deal, or demand a compromise more favorable to Tehran.
Of course Trump would never be in this mess if he had never torn up former President Barack Obama’s 2015 nuclear deal in the first place. As The New York Times noted, when Iran was cooperating with the uranium restrictions in the 2015 deal, “Iran’s weapon designers were left with too little nuclear fuel to build a single bomb.” Only after Trump pulled out of the deal in 2018 did Iran embark“on an enrichment spree” that moved them far closer to a bomb than before.
Trump exhibits a tendency to get bored by or change his mind about protracted international conflicts, and this time appears to be no different. As my colleague Hayes Brown has pointed out, at this point Trump would be lucky to get a deal even close to as strong as Obama’s was. Iran likely has a growing confidence in this as well — and wouldn’t be unreasonable to assume that they’re negotiating with someone whom they can wait out until he caves.
Zeeshan Aleem is a writer and editor for MS NOW. He primarily writes about politics and foreign policy.