By Matt Spetalnick and Steve Holland
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – With his campaign promises unfulfilled to quickly bring peace to Gaza and Ukraine, U.S. President Donald Trump has turned to another high-profile challenge that could be just as elusive: curbing Iran’s escalating nuclear program.
His administration plans a second round of talks with Iran on Saturday in Rome that few thought possible after years of hostility dating back to the Republican president’s first term, when he scrapped a 2015 nuclear deal and imposed a “maximum pressure” campaign of crippling sanctions.
While no one is ruling out the potential for progress after a meeting in Oman last weekend that both sides described as positive, negotiators are lowering any expectations of a swift breakthrough in the decades-long dispute.
Debate on elements of a potential framework nuclear deal is at a very early stage among Trump’s aides, said a source briefed on a White House meeting with the president on Tuesday. The two sides could reach an interim deal ahead of a more detailed agreement, said two sources familiar with White House thinking.
Adding to regional tensions surrounding the diplomatic effort is Trump’s repeated threat to bomb Iran’s nuclear sites if a deal cannot be reached.
That would mean that Trump, who pledged in his January 20 inaugural speech to be a “peacemaker,” could drive the U.S. into a new conflict in the Middle East.
Trump said on Thursday he was not in a rush to strike Iran, insisting that negotiations were his first option.
“If there’s a second option, I think it would be very bad for Iran,” Trump said during a White House meeting with Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni. “I think Iran is wanting to talk. I hope they’re wanting to talk. It’s going to be very good for them if they do.”
Leading the U.S. negotiating team is Steve Witkoff, a Trump friend and real estate investor with no prior diplomatic experience who some analysts have nicknamed the administration’s “envoy for everything.” He has been tasked with getting a deal with Iran in addition to ending the wars in Gaza and Ukraine, both of which have raged on.
Across the table will be Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araqchi, a shrewd negotiator who some Western diplomats worry will take advantage of Witkoff’s lack of expertise.
“Having to balance Gaza and Ukraine and Iran would be a challenge from a bandwidth perspective for anyone,” said Jonathan Panikoff, former deputy U.S. national intelligence officer on the Middle East, of Witkoff’s assignment.
“But that’s especially (the case) with Iran, given the amount of technical details, history, regional geopolitical considerations, and broader complexities,” added Panikoff, now with the Atlantic Council think-tank in Washington.
Witkoff has one distinctive negotiating asset: his direct line to Trump, which should signal to the Iranians they are getting the president’s views from someone he trusts.
Whether that will help the administration’s effort to secure a deal remains to be seen.
UNCERTAINTY
Witkoff’s own comments in recent days have injected further uncertainty over Trump’s endgame with Iran.
Ahead of last Saturday’s talks, he told the Wall Street Journal last week that the red line would be “weaponization” of Iran’s nuclear program, seeming to back away from Trump’s demand for full dismantlement.
He then told Fox News on Monday night that Iran could be allowed to enrich uranium at a low level but only with strict verification, before appearing to backtrack on Tuesday, saying in a post on X that Iran must “eliminate” its enrichment program.
In response, Araqchi said on Wednesday that “the principle of enrichment is not negotiable.”
Harsh sanctions on Iran appear to have helped draw the OPEC member-nation to the negotiating table.
But Tehran, which has long denied Western and Israeli accusations that it seeks a nuclear weapon, has approached the talks warily, suspicious of Trump and doubting the likelihood of an agreement.
Since Trump withdrew from the international nuclear accord with Iran in his first term, Iran has far surpassed the 2015 deal’s limits on uranium enrichment, producing stocks at a high level of fissile purity, close to that required for nuclear warheads.
MIXED DIPLOMATIC RECORD
Trump’s surprise announcement on April 7 of a resumption of talks with Iran spotlighted Witkoff’s central role in the administration’s foreign policy.
Witkoff’s record so far has been mixed. He has had no success securing a deal between Russia and Ukraine, countries at war since Moscow’s 2022 invasion of its neighbor.
Shortly before Trump took office, he helped secure a long-sought ceasefire in Gaza between Israel and Hamas militants, a deal that has since unraveled. Possible U.S. or Israeli military action is keeping the Middle East on edge.
Israel, which has severely weakened Iran’s regional influence since the Palestinian group Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, has long left little doubt that it could strike Iran’s nuclear sites to thwart what it considers an existential threat.
Caught off-guard by Trump’s decision to negotiate with Iran, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has urged a denuclearization deal like the one that Libya signed in 2003 – a deal Tehran is considered highly unlikely to accept.
Gulf states, nervous about another Middle East war, hope the negotiations continue but are concerned about being left out of the process, Gulf sources said.
Some analysts suggest that despite the steep obstacles to an Iran deal, a two-party agreement between the U.S. and Iran still might be less of a long shot for Trump than forging lasting peace between the warring sides in Gaza and Ukraine.
“As a party to a nuclear agreement, the U.S. can assert some measure of control,” said Laura Blumenfeld, a Middle East analyst at the Johns Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies in Washington. “Both are ready and eager to end nuclear tensions.”
(Additional reporting by Simon Lewis in Washington, Maayan Lubell and Alexander Cornwell in Jerusalem and Maha El Dahan in Dubai; Writing by Matt Spetalnick; Editing by Don Durfee and Howard Goller)
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