As President Donald Trump struggles to negotiate or intimidate his way out of the war he began with Iran, he is confronting the complicated legacy of his decision, eight years ago, to cancel what he has called “a horrible, one-sided deal.”
That Obama-era agreement suffered from flaws and omissions. It would have expired after 15 years, leaving Iran free after 2030 to make as much nuclear fuel as it wanted. But once Trump withdrew from the deal in 2018, the Iranians went on an enrichment spree much sooner, leaving them closer to a bomb than ever.
Now, Trump’s negotiators are dealing with the consequences of that decision, which he made over the objections of many of his national security advisers at the time. Underscoring the challenges, Trump on Saturday abruptly called off a round of nuclear talks with Iran in Pakistan.
Much recent attention has focused on Iran’s half ton of uranium that has been enriched to a level just shy of what is typically used in atom bombs. The majority of it is thought to be buried in a tunnel complex that Trump bombed last June. But those 970 pounds of potential bomb fuel represent only a fraction of the problem.
Today, international inspectors say, Iran has a total of 11 tons of uranium, at various enrichment levels. With further purification, that is enough to build up to 100 nuclear weapons — more than the estimated size of Israel’s arsenal.
Virtually all of that cache accumulated in the years after Trump abandoned the Obama-era deal. That is because Tehran, the capital, lived up to its pledge to ship to Russia 12.5 tons of its overall stockpile, about 97%. Iran’s weapon designers were left with too little nuclear fuel to build a single bomb.
Now, matching or exceeding that diplomatic accomplishment is one of the most complex challenges facing Trump and his two lead negotiators, his son-in-law Jared Kushner and his special envoy, Steve Witkoff, whose planned travel to Pakistan for another session of negotiations was canceled at the last minute by Trump. Central to the negotiations are the U.S. demand that Iran halt further enrichment and that it hand over the fuel stockpile it has built up over the past eight years; Iran is resisting on both fronts.
Trump is acutely aware that whatever he can negotiate with the Iranians will be compared with what Obama achieved more a decade ago. While the two countries are still exchanging proposals, and could well come up empty-handed, Trump is already judging his own, yet-to-be-negotiated agreement as superior.
“The DEAL that we are making with Iran will be FAR BETTER,” Trump wrote on his social media site on Monday. The Obama-era deal “was a guaranteed Road to a Nuclear Weapon, which will not, and cannot, happen with the deal we’re working on.”
Based on Trump’s often-shifting objectives for the conflict with Iran, Kushner and Witkoff face a daunting list of negotiation topics, many of which the Obama team failed to address. They have to find a way to limit Iran’s ability to rebuild its arsenal of missiles. (The 2015 deal never addressed Iran’s missile capability, and Tehran ignored a United Nations resolution imposing limits.)
They need to find a way to fulfill Trump’s mandate to protect anti-regime protesters, whom Trump promised to help in January when they took to the streets. In fact, those protests were among the triggers of the U.S. military buildup that ultimately led to the Feb. 28 attack.
And they must negotiate a reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, which the Iranians shut down after the U.S.-Israeli attacks, a move Trump was clearly unprepared for. Now Iran has discovered that a few inexpensive mines and threats to ships have given it huge leverage over the global economy, pressure it can dial up or down in ways that nuclear weapons cannot.
But it is the fate of the atomic program that lies at the negotiations’ heart. As in the 2015 talks, the Iranians declare they have a “right” to enrich under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, one they refuse to give up. But that still leaves room for “suspension” of all nuclear efforts for some number of years. (Vice President JD Vance demanded 20 years when he met his Pakistani interlocutors two weeks ago, only to have Trump declare a few days later that the right period was “unlimited.”)
William Burns, a former CIA chief who played a lead role in the Obama-era negotiations, said in The New York Times on Friday that a good deal would require “tight nuclear inspections, an extended moratorium on the enrichment of uranium and the export or dilution of Tehran’s existing stockpile of enriched uranium in exchange for tangible sanctions relief.”
He also called for the Trump administration to delineate every term. “Unless the lines are clearly drawn and strictly monitored,” Burns said, “the Iranians will paint outside them.”
That is exactly what happened when Trump pulled out of the Obama agreement in 2018 and replaced it with nothing. At the time, Iran did not have a single bomb’s worth of uranium. Then it started enriching with a vengeance.
In the current war, Trump has spoken publicly about a possible raid to seize Iran’s half ton of near-bomb grade material, which could make roughly 10 weapons. But he has not talked about the overall 11-ton cache and the threat it poses to the United States and its allies.
It is hardly a new problem. In 2006, Iran began enriching uranium on an industrial scale. While it described its aims as peaceful and civilian in nature, its aggressive moves convinced experts that Tehran wanted to build a bomb.
The alarms rang louder in 2010, when Iran began enriching uranium to 20%. That level of purity marks the official dividing line between civilian and military uses. Iran said it wanted the 20% fuel for a research reactor at the University of Tehran.
The 20% enrichment alarmed the Obama administration. It put the Iranians on the road to the 90% fuel used to make a warhead light and compact enough to fit atop a missile. (It is possible to make a weapon from 20% fuel, but it would be so large and heavy that a truck, boat or aircraft would be needed to deliver it.)
That loophole turned out to set them up well for what happened after Trump scrapped the agreement three years later and reimposed economic sanctions. The Iranians responded by blowing past all those limits.
Early in 2021, just before Trump left office, Iran reinstituted its goal of raising the enrichment level to 20%.
Then a mysterious blast knocked out power at Natanz, which is Iran’s main enrichment complex. Iranian officials blamed it on Israeli sabotage, and retaliated by raising part of its stockpile to the 60% level, the biggest jump in the history of its enrichment program. That was just a hairbreadth away from the highest military grade.
From early 2021 to early 2025, the Biden administration tried, unsuccessfully, to negotiate new limits. Throughout the negotiations, Iran kept enriching, expanding its cache of 60% fuel.
Then, in June, Trump bombed Iran’s enrichment plants at Natanz and Fordo, as well as uranium storage tunnels and other facilities at Isfahan. He declared that the nuclear program had been “obliterated.”
As President Donald Trump struggles to negotiate or intimidate his way out of the war he began with Iran, he is confronting the complicated legacy of his decision, eight years ago, to cancel what he has called “a horrible, one-sided deal.”
That Obama-era agreement suffered from flaws and omissions. It would have expired after 15 years, leaving Iran free after 2030 to make as much nuclear fuel as it wanted. But once Trump withdrew from the deal in 2018, the Iranians went on an enrichment spree much sooner, leaving them closer to a bomb than ever.
Now, Trump’s negotiators are dealing with the consequences of that decision, which he made over the objections of many of his national security advisers at the time. Underscoring the challenges, Trump on Saturday abruptly called off a round of nuclear talks with Iran in Pakistan.
Much recent attention has focused on Iran’s half ton of uranium that has been enriched to a level just shy of what is typically used in atom bombs. The majority of it is thought to be buried in a tunnel complex that Trump bombed last June. But those 970 pounds of potential bomb fuel represent only a fraction of the problem.
Today, international inspectors say, Iran has a total of 11 tons of uranium, at various enrichment levels. With further purification, that is enough to build up to 100 nuclear weapons — more than the estimated size of Israel’s arsenal.
Virtually all of that cache accumulated in the years after Trump abandoned the Obama-era deal. That is because Tehran, the capital, lived up to its pledge to ship to Russia 12.5 tons of its overall stockpile, about 97%. Iran’s weapon designers were left with too little nuclear fuel to build a single bomb.
Now, matching or exceeding that diplomatic accomplishment is one of the most complex challenges facing Trump and his two lead negotiators, his son-in-law Jared Kushner and his special envoy, Steve Witkoff, whose planned travel to Pakistan for another session of negotiations was canceled at the last minute by Trump. Central to the negotiations are the U.S. demand that Iran halt further enrichment and that it hand over the fuel stockpile it has built up over the past eight years; Iran is resisting on both fronts.
Trump is acutely aware that whatever he can negotiate with the Iranians will be compared with what Obama achieved more a decade ago. While the two countries are still exchanging proposals, and could well come up empty-handed, Trump is already judging his own, yet-to-be-negotiated agreement as superior.
“The DEAL that we are making with Iran will be FAR BETTER,” Trump wrote on his social media site on Monday. The Obama-era deal “was a guaranteed Road to a Nuclear Weapon, which will not, and cannot, happen with the deal we’re working on.”
Based on Trump’s often-shifting objectives for the conflict with Iran, Kushner and Witkoff face a daunting list of negotiation topics, many of which the Obama team failed to address. They have to find a way to limit Iran’s ability to rebuild its arsenal of missiles. (The 2015 deal never addressed Iran’s missile capability, and Tehran ignored a United Nations resolution imposing limits.)
They need to find a way to fulfill Trump’s mandate to protect anti-regime protesters, whom Trump promised to help in January when they took to the streets. In fact, those protests were among the triggers of the U.S. military buildup that ultimately led to the Feb. 28 attack.
And they must negotiate a reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, which the Iranians shut down after the U.S.-Israeli attacks, a move Trump was clearly unprepared for. Now Iran has discovered that a few inexpensive mines and threats to ships have given it huge leverage over the global economy, pressure it can dial up or down in ways that nuclear weapons cannot.
But it is the fate of the atomic program that lies at the negotiations’ heart. As in the 2015 talks, the Iranians declare they have a “right” to enrich under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, one they refuse to give up. But that still leaves room for “suspension” of all nuclear efforts for some number of years. (Vice President JD Vance demanded 20 years when he met his Pakistani interlocutors two weeks ago, only to have Trump declare a few days later that the right period was “unlimited.”)
William Burns, a former CIA chief who played a lead role in the Obama-era negotiations, said in The New York Times on Friday that a good deal would require “tight nuclear inspections, an extended moratorium on the enrichment of uranium and the export or dilution of Tehran’s existing stockpile of enriched uranium in exchange for tangible sanctions relief.”
He also called for the Trump administration to delineate every term. “Unless the lines are clearly drawn and strictly monitored,” Burns said, “the Iranians will paint outside them.”
That is exactly what happened when Trump pulled out of the Obama agreement in 2018 and replaced it with nothing. At the time, Iran did not have a single bomb’s worth of uranium. Then it started enriching with a vengeance.
In the current war, Trump has spoken publicly about a possible raid to seize Iran’s half ton of near-bomb grade material, which could make roughly 10 weapons. But he has not talked about the overall 11-ton cache and the threat it poses to the United States and its allies.
The alarms rang louder in 2010, when Iran began enriching uranium to 20%. That level of purity marks the official dividing line between civilian and military uses. Iran said it wanted the 20% fuel for a research reactor at the University of Tehran.
Oman Observer is now on the WhatsApp channel. Click here
