How close is the United States and Iran to striking a new nuclear deal? According to President Donald Trump, the two nations are nearing the final stretch. During his four-day trip to the Middle East last week, Trump made it seem like an agreement was already being initialed. “Iran has sort of agreed to the terms,” he said in Qatar. “They’re not going to make, I call it, in a friendly way, nuclear dust. We’re not going to be making any nuclear dust in Iran.”
As he often does, Trump was embellishing reality. The negotiations between Washington and Tehran only started on April 12, so to think the two are near the end-game of finalizing a highly-technical nuclear accord is very difficult to imagine. It took the Obama administration and Iran about three years to negotiate the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), a process that had its fair share of stumbling points along the way. From the looks of it, the Trump administration’s own talks with the Iranians have only touched the surface; the first four rounds didn’t get into the nitty-gritty details, which is likely one reason why U.S. and Iranian officials were relatively upbeat.
Trump is a man in a hurry. He doesn’t want Tehran to string the talks along and has stated numerous times that the Iranians have two options: they can either get of their nuclear program the easy way or the hard way. And the hard way, military force, would be terrible for them. “They know they have to move quickly or something bad is gonna happen,” Trump said.
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Events on Iran
