An Iranian missile system is displayed next to a banner with a picture of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and the late Lebanon’s Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, in a street in Tehran, Iran, October 2, 2024.
Majid Asgaripour | Via Reuters
Iran’s fortunes may look entirely different over the course of President Donald Trump’s second term — whether for Tehran’s good or very ill.
In surprising moves, Trump has now several times expressed his desire to make a deal with Iran — most recently by way of a letter to Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei last week, asking that the two leaders should “negotiate” over the Middle Eastern country’s nuclear program. This comes in contrast to seven years prior, back in 2018, when Trump who pulled the U.S. out of the original 2015 nuclear deal, triggering a nosedive in American-Iranian relations.
“I would like a deal done with Iran on non-nuclear. I would prefer that to bombing the hell out of it,” Trump said in an interview with the New York Post in early February.
Yet Trump has simultaneously re-launched his “maximum pressure” sanctions campaign on the oil-exporting country since retaking office. Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Khamenei, meanwhile, has flat-out refused to give up Tehran’s nuclear program and rebuffed Trump’s outreach. On Saturday, the Iranian leader condemned attempts by unnamed “bullying governments” to make a deal and vowing that his government will not negotiate under pressure.
Iran is under pressure – from its own spiraling economy, the dramatic loss of regional allies like Bashar al-Assad in Syria, and from the weakening of proxy forces like Hezbollah in Lebanon, following Israeli.
But while its strength in those areas has greatly lessened than during Trump’s first term, its leverage in another aspect — the sheer volume of nuclear material it has produced — is now much greater.
‘Significant concerns’ over weapons development
Iran has been enriching and stockpiling uranium at its highest levels ever, prompting the International Atomic Energy Agency, the United Nations’ nuclear watchdog, to issue numerous warnings.
“Iran remains the only non-nuclear weapon state enriching uranium to this level, raising significant concerns over potential weapons development,” a U.N. news release from March 3 read.
A picture taken on November 10, 2019, shows workers on a construction site in Iran’s Bushehr nuclear power plant during an official ceremony to kick-start works for a second reactor at the facility. Bushehr is currently running on imported fuel from Russia that is closely monitored by the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency.
ATTA KENARE | AFP via Getty Images
“Iran keeps enriching [uranium] as part of its leverage-building exercise,” Sanam Vakil, director of the Middle East and North Africa Programme at Chatham House, told CNBC. “The more it has, the more it can offload, and that can appear to be a compromise for any such deal that will come down the line.”
Tehran insists that its program is for civilian energy purposes only. But Iran’s nuclear enrichment has reached 60% purity, according to the IAEA — dramatically higher than the enrichment limit posited in the 2015 nuclear deal, and a short technical step from the weapons-grade purity level of 90%.
“A country enriching at 60% is a very serious thing. Only countries making bombs are reaching this level,” IAEA chief Rafael Grossi said in 2021.
Under the 2015 nuclear deal, formally called the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), Iran committed to capping levels of 3.67% enriched uranium at 300 kilograms.
Iran now has nearly 22 times that material, Energy Intelligence reports, citing the IAEA. And Trump has not ruled out U.S. or Israeli military strikes on Iran to prevent it from building a bomb.
Mutual distrust
Still, there is a dominant preference in Iran toward making a deal that would lift sanctions, says Bijan Khajehpour, an economist and a managing partner at Vienna-based consultancy Eurasian Nexus Partners.
The problem?
“There is deep distrust on both sides,” Khajehpour told CNBC. “Especially, the public episode of Zelenskyy in the Oval Office has reminded the Iranians that it will be difficult to have confidence in a potential future deal with the Trump administration.”
A White House visit by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy unexpectedly devolved in a heated and public clash with Trump in late February.
“On the other side,” Khajehpour added, “a potential lifting or reduction of sanctions would be indispensable for the trajectory of the Iranian economy.”
But the U.S. and Trump have the overwhelming leverage now, says Behnam Ben Taleblu, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
“President Trump has significantly more leverage now than when he first entered office in 2017 against Iran,” Ben Taleblu said. “Israel has degraded some of the Islamic Republic’s regional proxies and structural issues and lingering American sanctions have kept the Iranian economy on its back foot.”
“And while the idea of Iran’s increased nuclear capacity as leverage is not lost on me, their nuclear card is their only card to play at the moment,” he said.
Tehran buying time?
Concerning the Iranian supreme leader’s objection to negotiating under pressure, Behnam contended that “the Islamic Republic always says no until it says yes.” He also argued that the country “continues enriching uranium and … increasing its stockpiles of highly enriched uranium because it wants a nuclear weapon,” rather than because it simply wants leverage in talks.
“Tehran wants to trap Trump in talks, be it directly or via Russian mediation,” he said, referencing the reported role Russia has been asked to play by the Trump administration in potential negotiations.
“This is not to resolve the nuclear matter but to blunt maximum pressure and generate impediments to a potential Israeli or American strike.”
Rather than choosing to strike a deal or have no agreement at all, Iran’s government is likely choosing a third option to just “muddle through” and buy time, Chatham House’s Vakil holds.
That’s both “to build further leverage at a time when the region and the West sees Iran as weak” and to get a better sense of Trump’s priorities and terms for negotiation, she said.
Additionally, “Iran is going to commence negotiations with Europe as a stalling mechanism for snapback sanctions and to keep the door to negotiations going,” Vakil said, “while Washington develops their own strategy and priorities.”
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