How Iran Is Using a Familiar Playbook on Nuclear Talks

The Trump administration risks repeating the mistakes of Obama and Biden in reaching a deal with Tehran.

The United States and Iran have now had two rounds of talks on a potential deal over Iran’s nuclear weapons program, with a third round scheduled for this weekend. While President Donald Trump has talked tough on Iran, threatening military action if Iran refuses to negotiate a new agreement, his administration risks repeating the mistakes of his predecessors. Both Barack Obama and Joe Biden severely diminished their prospects of a good deal by softening their initially strong negotiating red lines and deadlines. And the Trump administration is at a distinct disadvantage: Iran’s continued progress on developing a nuclear weapon means time is running out, and there is little room for error.

Back in February, Trump stated that he would “much rather see a deal with Iran where we can do a deal, supervise, check it, inspect it, and then blow it up, or just make sure that there is no more nuclear.” Last month, National Security Adviser Mike Waltz called for total dismantlement: “that’s enrichment, that is weaponization, and that is its strategic missile program.” And after opening discussions in Oman on April 13, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth reiterated: “Iran, come to the table, negotiate, full dismantlement of your nuclear capabilities.”

Obama said almost the exact same thing when the first talks began in 2012: “Our goal is to get Iran to recognize it needs to give up its nuclear program.” He and his top officials explicitly demanded an agreement in which Tehran would allow highly intrusive inspections while forfeiting its self-proclaimed “right” to enrich uranium and giving up its deeply buried Fordo facility, its advanced centrifuges, its ambitions to build heavy water reactors, and its nuclear-capable ballistic missiles.

Trump also mimicked his predecessors in giving Iran clear deadlines to agree to U.S. ultimatums. But his recent warnings that “we are down to the final moments” and “something is going to happen very soon” sound a lot like what Tehran was hearing from the Obama and Biden administrations. Trump’s declaration that Tehran has “two options: military action or a negotiated solution” mirror Obama’s pledges to “take no options off the table, including military options.” Ongoing discussions of military options, and surges of American forces to the Middle East, harken back to 2012 when three U.S. carrier strike groups plied regional waterways.

But the situation is much different now. Back in 2012, when Obama began the negotiations that would culminate in the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), Iran needed multiple months to produce one bomb’s worth of weapons-grade uranium. Trump withdrew the United States from that deal in 2018, citing Iran’s lack of compliance, and Biden failed to reach a new deal with the Islamic Republic. Today, Iran can make enough uranium for a dozen bombs in mere weeks. Returning just to the JCPOA’s limited restrictions on Iran’s ability to make fissile material—essentially Tehran’s standing offer—now would entail dismantling twice the enrichment capacity as in 2015. Equally crucial, Iran now needs just several months to weaponize, down sharply from the one to two years it required in the Obama era. And unlike before, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei faces real internal pressures to cross the threshold, possibly with a device that would not first require the provocative enrichment of uranium to 90 percent purity.

Trump faces a different set of pressures. Israel’s anxiety for talks to conclude, quickly and clearly, is greater than ever before. After severely degrading Iran’s defenses and retaliatory capabilities last year, it now has a profound sense of urgency to act militarily, before Tehran reconstitutes its shattered arsenals or decides to take the final quick step to a nuclear bomb. As per the U.N. Security Council resolution that enacted the JCPOA in 2015, Trumps faces the added time crunch to reimpose strict U.N. “snap back” sanctions on Iran’s nuclear and conventional weapons programs before this option disappears in October. Starting no later than May, this will require months of concerted coordination with European allies that are still party to the JCPOA.

These factors play into Iran’s hands. The Iranian regime understands that America is more willing to assume risk and expend political capital in initiating and sustaining high-level diplomacy than in ditching it for harsher measures. The more Washington chains itself to the table and walks back its ultimatums one by one, the more Iran amasses counterpressure, secures more concessions, and deflates American military threats.

This became a doom loop in the past. In 2014-15, Supreme Leader Khamenei’s red lines won out over Obama’s. Three separate times over nine months, Iran successfully forced the United States to soften its demands and scrap its deadlines by digging in and vowing to abandon talks if Khamenei’s ultimatums were not met. The end result was the JCPOA and its severely limited, reversible, and temporary limits on a legitimized, industrial-scale Iranian nuclear program. By threatening to walk, Iran also compelled Obama to stop brandishing military options. As one dismayed American official said shortly before the deal was sealed in 2015, Iran kept “turning our own deadline against us, to see if we would give ground.”

After the American withdrawal from the JCPOA, Iran then picked right back up with the Biden administration, balking for more than a year at repeated U.S. warnings about time running out to rejoin the JCPOA. Ultimately Tehran called Washington’s bluff yet again. It simply quit the talks in summer 2022, after exploiting them as diplomatic cover to nearly triple its enrichment capacity and boost energy exports in defiance of U.S. sanctions. In both cases, America’s malleable demands encouraged Iran to ramp up its own military option, attacking U.S. assets and interests in the Middle East and eroding U.S. deterrence further.

The Trump team seems to be falling toward this same trap. Iran is taking its usual tack by angling for time-consuming indirect talks and interim arrangements, insisting on nebulous U.S. guarantees to abide by a new deal, and refusing “excessive demands” that contravene Khamenei’s established red lines—all while still engaging diplomatically to forestall military action. In the space of less than a week, envoy Steve Witkoff responded by pivoting his position, from explicit dismantlement to something that looks much more like the original JCPOA.

Precisely because Trump was bequeathed much less of a lead to squander than either Obama or Biden, his team cannot repeat past mistakes that put America’s supposedly non-negotiable demands on the chopping block and let Iran then extend talks indefinitely.

Foremost, Trump should stick with his initial warnings that reportedly pushed Tehran into accepting talks. Any softening of demands, deadlines, and military threats in response to Iran’s latest vows to evict inspectors, leave the Nonproliferation Treaty, and strike U.S. bases would be counterproductive. Tehran would love nothing more than for Trump to repeat Obama’s mistake of openly treating Israeli action as hindering a good deal, or the own-goal by Biden’s envoy of admitting to Congress that there is no military option. Instead, the administration should explicitly frame U.S. and Israeli military readiness as the sole alternative to meeting America’s demands diplomatically.

The less U.S. daylight with partners, the more Iran can be forced to do something unprecedented: negotiate in good faith. Previous talks show all too clearly how Iran uses brinkmanship to extract a cascade of major U.S. concessions as deadlines loom ever larger.

Even more important, if also overlooked, is how the deepening opacity of Iran’s entire atomic enterprise—everything from centrifuges to weapons design—gives it built-in leverage by inhibiting the United States from knowing, with any accuracy, just how much of its nuclear program Iran is putting on the table in the first place. Trump officials emphasize verification in any deal, and they met International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Director Rafael Grossi last weekend in Rome on the sidelines of second-round talks with Iran. Hopefully they took to heart Grossi’s warnings of completely losing track of Iran’s nuclear progress, and how going “back into the JCPOA box wouldn’t work.”

Iran likely will demand U.S. sanctions relief first, similar to the concessions it extracted in the pre-JCPOA interim deal in 2013. But Trump should flip this failed script by offering instead to halt U.N. snapback and other pressures only if Iran opens the books on its nuclear program, complies fully with IAEA safeguards, and meets all other U.S. demands by his original 60-day deadline.

The longer talks go, the more American officials will be counseled not to let diplomacy fail, despite how that turned out for past negotiations. In fact, it is exactly because this crisis is down to the final moments that there is no luxury of trading away time, or anything else. At this point, the president has just one, incredibly stark diplomatic choice: Get a good deal right away, or get busy dealing with the problem undiplomatically.