Trump says the US and Iran will hold 'direct' nuclear talks

Washington: President Donald Trump said Monday that the United States would engage in "direct" negotiations with Iran next Saturday in a last-ditch effort to rein in the country's nuclear program, saying Tehran would be "in great danger" if it failed to reach an accord.

If direct talks take place, they would be the first official face-to-face negotiations between the two countries since Trump abandoned the Obama-era nuclear accord seven years ago. But they would come at a perilous moment, as Iran has lost the air defenses around its key nuclear sites because of precise Israeli strikes last October. And Iran can no longer rely on its proxy forces in the Middle East -- Hamas, Hezbollah and the now-ousted Assad government in Syria -- to threaten Israel with retaliation.

On the order of its supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran has refused to sit down with US officials in direct nuclear negotiations since Trump pulled out of the last accord. So any face-to-face talks would in themselves represent great progress, though Iran is almost certain to resist dismantling its entire nuclear infrastructure, which has given it a "threshold" capability to make the fuel for a bomb in a matter of weeks -- and perhaps a full weapon in months. Many Iranians have begun to talk openly about the need for the country to build a weapon since it has proved fairly defenseless in a series of missile exchanges with Israel last year.

Sitting beside Trump on Monday during a visit to the United States, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu insisted that any resulting deal must follow what he called the "Libya model," meaning that Iran would have to dismantle and ship out of the country its entire nuclear infrastructure. But much of Libya's nuclear enrichment equipment had never been uncrated before it was turned over to the United States in 2003; Iran's nuclear infrastructure has been operating for decades, and is spread around the country, much of it deep underground.

Netanyahu was strangely quiet during a lengthy Q&A session with reporters, a sharp contrast to his last visit to Washington, two months ago. After a few introductory remarks, he was largely a spectator as Trump railed against European nations that he said had "screwed" the United States, and threatened even more punishing tariffs against China unless it reversed its threat of retaliatory tariffs by Tuesday. He further muddied the waters about whether his tariff structure was intended to be a permanent source of revenue for the United States or whether it would just be leverage for negotiations.

Netanyahu left the Oval Office without a public commitment from Trump to wipe out the 17% tariff he had placed on Israel, one of America's closest allies. Getting such a commitment had been one of the key objectives of his trip, along with securing even more weapons for the war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip and for Israeli military action in the West Bank. If the two men discussed Israeli or joint Israel-US military options against the main Iranian nuclear sites, they gave no indication of having done so during their public comments.

The closest Trump came was to say: "I think everybody agrees that doing a deal would be preferable to doing the obvious. And the obvious is not something that I want to be involved with, or frankly that Israel wants to be involved with, if they can avoid it."

He added: "So we are going to see if we can avoid it, but it's getting to be very dangerous territory, and hopefully those talks will be successful."

Three Iranian officials with knowledge of talks with the United States said that Trump's description of the impending talks was not entirely accurate. They said Iran's understanding of discussions in Oman was that they would begin with indirect talks, where each country's negotiators would sit in separate rooms and Omani diplomats would carry messages back and forth, the officials said.

That setup would be similar to the indirect talks that the Biden administration had, in which the intermediaries were European officials. However, the Iranian officials said that Tehran would be open to direct talks with the United States if the indirect negotiations went well.

Trump is, to some degree, solving a problem of his own making. The 2015 nuclear accord resulted in Iran shipping out of the country 97% of its enriched uranium, leaving small amounts in the country, and the equipment needed to produce nuclear fuel. President Barack Obama and his top aides said at the time that the deal was the best they could extract. But it left Iran with the equipment and the know-how to rebuild after Trump pulled out of the accord, and today it has enough fuel to produce upward of six nuclear weapons in relatively short order.

How long that would take is a matter of dispute: The New York Times reported in early February that new intelligence indicated a secret team of Iranian scientists were exploring a faster, if cruder approach to developing an atomic weapon. Trump has presumably since been briefed on those findings, which came at the end of the Biden administration, and they have added urgency to the talks. Administration officials say they will not engage in a prolonged negotiation with Tehran.