President Donald Trump and his team are celebrating an Iran peace deal they say will end Tehran’s nuclear ambitions.
But the accord rests on commitments that Iran hasn’t actually made yet. And it may never.
According to early statements from officials in both countries, the two sides agree on a couple basic points: the deal reopens the Strait of Hormuz without tolls and lifts the American blockade of Iran, although even that hasn’t yet happened.
Everything else Trump hoped to accomplish when he launched the war over three months ago remains a work in progress. And while the White House says it can hammer out specifics over the next 60 days, it took the Obama administration nearly two years to strike a deal that traded reduced sanctions and other economic incentives for Iran’s commitment to significant curbs on its nuclear work.
On Monday, the White House offered little indication how it could meet Trump’s demand to get a better deal than the Obama administration in such a minuscule time frame.
“I don’t need to go into all the details today about what we believe we have an understanding on, but I think we’ll know over the next two to three weeks whether those understandings will turn into an actual agreement, and whether we can change the course of the region,” said a senior U.S. official.
Iran has not destroyed its enriched nuclear material, dismantled any nuclear sites, or accepted an inspection regime — which has yet to be designed. And on Monday, senior U.S. officials said there was no guarantee Iran would. Their assertions that Tehran will never get a nuclear bomb are contingent on Iran abiding by mostly generic commitments it made in exchange for promises from Washington for access to frozen funds, sanctions relief and other economic assistance.
“The more that the Iranians are willing to work with us on their nuclear program, on verifying that they’re not building a nuclear weapon, on not funding radicalism and terrorism in the region, the more that they’re going to be welcomed into the world economy through a combination of sanctions relief and other economic measures,” said a second senior U.S. official, who, like others, was granted anonymity to discuss the talks.
The White House hasn’t made the text of the agreement public, but the first U.S. official said on Monday that would happen in the next 24 to 48 hours.
Supporters and opponents of diplomacy alike are wondering why the details are still under wraps. Some are suspicious of the fine print, wondering what was actually agreed after Trump pledged not to accept any Iranian enrichment and repeatedly promised no funds would flow to Iran.
“Why not release the text right now? Why delay?” asked Elliott Abrams, who was special representative for Iran and Venezuela in the first Trump administration and is now at the Council on Foreign Relations.
Iran, for its part, has said Tehran will maintain control of the vital Strait of Hormuz, hasn’t committed to any curbs on its nuclear program and will be able to access billions in frozen assets. The White House says Iranian state media depictions of the deal are overstated and designed to sell the accord to its public.
In touting the deal, Trump has made a variety of maximalist pledges, including that “no money will exchange hands” with Iran. His team has repeatedly telegraphed, however, that Iran could ultimately see significant financial relief if the deal comes to fruition. For example, the U.S. has offered a $300 billion fund to rebuild Iran if it complies, the senior U.S. official said Monday.
More immediately, the U.S. could release frozen funds as a confidence building measure, the first official said.
“We are prepared to release frozen funds, and we are prepared to give these sanctions, and we’ll do some small gestures of that in the beginning if they make some small gestures to us that show that they’re willing to meet their commitments,” the first official said. “Everything we do will be transparent, there’ll be no side deals, the MOU will be released.”
Even in the most optimistic scenarios, the reshaped Middle East envisioned by Trump’s team is years away. While the White House argues economic relief for Iran will be enough to keep things moving forward, the arrangement is not the simple carrot it describes.
Tehran has also walked away from the fighting with its own bargaining chips.
“Iran knows Washington’s leverage is limited. If nuclear talks collapse and the U.S. strikes again, Tehran can simply shut the Strait of Hormuz and reignite the global economic pain everyone is trying to avoid,” said Jonathan Panikoff, a former career intelligence officer who worked on the Middle East and is now at the Atlantic Council.
He added: “We know that Iran is willing to absorb more pain economically than it thinks the U.S. and the global community are willing to absorb.”
Some of the concessions that the U.S. has netted from Iran are ones Washington has won before. Trump and his team have touted Iran’s pledge that it would not pursue a nuclear weapon. “In fact they no longer want a Nuclear weapon,” Trump wrote on Truth Social on Saturday.
Getting Iran to make that pledge has never been the most difficult part of diplomacy. Iran committed to do so more than five decades ago when it signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty that prevents non-nuclear states from developing atomic weapons and restated that promise when it reached the JCPOA with the U.S. and five other world powers during the Obama administration.
The U.S. government has long been suspicious of such commitments and Iran’s nuclear advances in recent years have repeatedly called that commitment into question.
The nuclear issues that Trump wants to see the accord settle are myriad. Iran must first deal with its highly enriched uranium, which was buried underground after the U.S. and Israel attacked its nuclear sites last year. Extracting it is already a highly technical challenge. The U.S. also wants Iran to disband its nuclear program, dismantle its nuclear facilities and agree to a yet-to-be specified inspections and verification regime to make sure it doesn’t restart its program in the future.
Obama’s final deal, which addressed many of these challenges and which Trump long maligned before withdrawing from it in 2018, took some 20 months to negotiate after an interim accord came in 2013. And that interim deal itself came only after years of talks.
Trump’s team is proposing to settle Iran’s nuclear future in 60 days — if not sooner. While the Trump administration held nuclear negotiations with Iran since returning to office, it’s not clear whether the new regime would want to build on those or start from scratch.
“We want to put the nuclear discussions and everything up front,” the first senior official said, adding that the U.S. will know more on whether those will succeed in “the next 30 days.”
Trump and his team have tried to negotiate with Iran over its nuclear program since he returned to office, pledging to use military and economic pressure to secure a better deal than Obama’s. It’s not clear this time will be any different, with many Iran watchers expecting the fanfare may not produce much at all.
“The most likely scenario is they never get a nuclear deal,” said one GOP foreign policy operative.
Daniella Cheslow contributed to this report.
