A short handshake can be the most probable result of the preliminary diplomatic interviews set for Saturday between American and Iranian officials.
It would probably be enough to keep the discussions and potentially lead to the first official face to face between the two countries since President Trump abandoned a historical nuclear agreement seven years ago.
The interviews, which will be held in Oman, will act as a sensation session to see if the Trump administration and the Iranian clerical government could move to complete negotiations to limit Iran’s nuclear program.
Both sides come with great distrust, given that Mr. Trump moved away from the 2015 agreement that Iran had mediated with the United States and other world powers and slapped harsh penalties on Tehran during his first term.
Mr. Trump now wants to conclude an agreement – both to show his negotiation skills and to prevent sober tensions between Iran and Israel from intensifying himself in a more intense conflict that would have further revolved the Middle East. Iranian officials are skeptical but “ready to commit themselves seriously and in order to seal an agreement,” wrote Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi this week.
The objectives of Saturday’s meeting are modest, reflecting the gap between the two sides: to agree on a picture for negotiations and a temporal sequence. It is not clear if the sent will speak directly, as Mr. Trump insisted, or will pass the messages through the intermediaries of Oman who move between the rooms, as Signor Araghchi indicated.
The Iranian delegation plans to communicate that it is open to talk about reductions to its enrichment and to allow external monitoring, according to two high Iranian officials who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss a delicate question. But, they said, the negotiators are not interested in discussing the dismantling of the nuclear program, on which the officials of the Trump administration have insisted.
Experts provide that a handshake or another short meeting would be a way to satisfy both sides and send a gesture of good will without direct negotiations.
Trump said it would be based on instinct that Saturday’s talks are held in a complex on the sea, they could bloom in further negotiations. “When you start talking, you know if they’re going well or not,” he said this week. “And I would say that the conclusion would be when I think they are not going well. And this is just a feeling.”
What’s at stake?
In question is the decreased power of the original nuclear deal – that European leaders continued to limp since 2018, when Trump withdrawn the United States – before his most punitive restrictions run away in October.
Known as the complete joint action plan and completed under President Barack Obama, the agreement was the result of scrupulous technical negotiations that agreed to raise international sanctions against Iran in exchange for limits to its nuclear program.
Only nine countries around the world have nuclear weapons and the addition of Iran to the list could represent an existential threat for its main opponent, Israel and perhaps other nations. Experts also raised concerns that Iran could share its nuclear skills, potentially with terrorist groups.
Iran has long claimed that its nuclear activities are legal and meaning only for civil purposes, such as energy and medicine, and not for weapons. But it enriched the uranium, the key ingredient for a nuclear bomb, beyond the levels necessary for civil use.
In the years in which Trump has withdrawn from the agreement, Iran has constantly accelerated the enrichment of uranium to the point where some experts estimate that it could soon build a nuclear weapon. His economy crumbled under American sanctions and Mr. Trump this week has imposed new measures intended for the Iranian oil trade.
The Israel government believes that Tehran will expand its nuclear program and is pushing to destroy it.
“The agreement with Iran is acceptable only if the nuclear sites are destroyed under the supervision of the United States,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel said this week. “Otherwise, the military option is the only choice.”
While Mr. Araghchi was strictly involved in previous negotiations, the expected American envoy, Steve Witkoff, has little experience in the technical aspects of the Iranian program. He was ready to arrive in Oman after a visit on Friday in St. Petersburg for the interviews with the president Vladimir V. Putin on a potential ceased the fire between Russia and Ukraine.
Iran will almost certainly extend the diplomatic interviews as long as possible – both to delay any Israeli military action and to push beyond a deadline of October 18 when the United Nations Authority to impose rapid sanctions “snapback” expires.
“They have the opportunity to tie Israel and the United States in knots by entering the negotiations in which they deceive themselves in thinking that the negotiations will produce a lot,” said Elliott Abrams, which was sent Iranian of Mr. Trump during his first term. “And so the negotiations begin, which retains Israel, and continue and continue.”
A new agreement, he said, “could be reached quite quickly”, but Iran most likely would be committed with little more than what he accepted in the 2015 agreement. This result would irritate Israel.
It may also not be sufficient for Mr. Trump, who had previously asked the Iranian missiles previously and to his shiring prosecutor’s forces in Iraq, Lebanon and Yemen, to say that he has tightened a better agreement than his democratic predecessors.
Diplomacy or conflict?
Mr. Abrams provided that Israel eventually would still hit Iran. At least since last autumn, Israel has prepared long -range long -orm missiles, including those that can affect underground goals, for an air attack on Iran.
The Trump administration has also deployed an extraordinary remote military accumulation, including two aircraft carriers, B-2 invisible bombers and combat jets, as well as aerial defenses.
Yet Mr. Trump wants to avoid a new war in the region, that his councilors have warned are siphon the military resources away from other potential threats, such as China, and diminish his efforts to be a president of peace.
“The president does not really want to use the military here,” said Dana Stroul, who was the best officer of the Pentagon for the Middle East policy during the Biden administration.
Similar to how other recent presidents have dealt with Iran, he said, Mr. Trump seems to have considered “how a military campaign would be and what could actually make and choose to try the diplomatic track first”.
He noticed that Mr. Trump is planning to visit Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates as soon as next month. “What he is feeling from all the Arab leaders with whom he is talking is that they don’t want war no longer,” he said.
Trump said he is prepared for the worst. “If you request military, we will have military,” said Wednesday, adding that Israel would obviously be the leader of this “.
Iran is also turning on. “He marks my words: Iran prefers diplomacy, but knows how to defend himself,” wrote Araghchi. “We seek peace, but we will never accept submission. “
Farnaz Fassihi Contributed relationships.