US and Iran will hold ‘direct’ nuclear talks: Trump

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.

On the order of its supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran has refused to sit down with U.S. 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.

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.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.