President Trump said on Monday that the United States would engage in “direct” negotiations with Iran next Saturday in a last-ditch effort to rein in the country’s nuclear program, saying Tehran would be “in great danger” if it failed to reach an accord.
If direct talks take place, they would be the first official face-to-face negotiations between the two countries since Mr. Trump abandoned the Obama-era nuclear accord seven years ago. They would also come at a perilous moment, as Iran has lost the air defenses around its key nuclear sites because of precise Israeli strikes last October. And Iran can no longer rely on its proxy forces in the Middle East — Hamas, Hezbollah and the now-ousted Assad government in Syria — to threaten Israel with retaliation.
In a social media post, Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, confirmed that talks would take place on Saturday in Oman — but he said that they would be indirect, meaning intermediaries would work with the two sides. “It is as much an opportunity as it is a test. The ball is in America’s court,” Mr. Araghchi said.
On the order of its supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran has refused to sit down with American officials in direct nuclear negotiations since Mr. Trump pulled out of the last accord. After Mr. Trump spoke on Monday, however, three Iranian officials said Ayatollah Khamenei had shifted his position to potentially allow direct talks.
The officials said that if Saturday’s indirect talks are respectful and productive, then direct talks may happen. The officials asked not to be named because they were not authorized to speak publicly.
Still, Iran is almost certain to resist dismantling its entire nuclear infrastructure, which has given it a “threshold” capability to make the fuel for a bomb in a matter of weeks — and perhaps a full weapon in months. Many Iranians have begun to talk openly about the need for the country to build a weapon since it has proved fairly defenseless in a series of missile exchanges with Israel last year.
Sitting beside Mr. Trump on Monday during a visit to the United States, Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, insisted that any resulting deal must follow what he called the “Libya model,” meaning that Iran would have to dismantle and ship out of the country its entire nuclear infrastructure. But much of Libya’s nuclear enrichment equipment had never been uncrated before it was turned over to the United States in 2003; Iran’s nuclear infrastructure has been operating for decades and is spread around the country, much of it deep underground.
Mr. Netanyahu was strangely quiet during a lengthy question-and-answer session with reporters, a sharp contrast with his last visit to Washington, two months ago. After a few introductory remarks, he was largely a spectator as Mr. Trump railed against European nations he said had “screwed” the United States and threatened even more punishing tariffs against China unless it reversed its threat of retaliatory tariffs by Tuesday. He further muddied the waters about whether his tariff structure was intended to be a permanent source of U.S. revenue or just leverage for negotiations.
Mr. Netanyahu left the Oval Office without a public commitment from Mr. Trump to wipe out the 17 percent tariff he had placed on Israel, one of America’s closest allies. Getting such a commitment had been one of the key objectives of his trip, along with securing even more weapons for the war against Hamas in Gaza and for Israeli military action in the West Bank. If the two men discussed Israeli or joint Israel-American military options against the main Iranian nuclear sites, they gave no indication of having done so during their public comments.
The closest Mr. Trump came was to say: “I think everybody agrees that doing a deal would be preferable to doing the obvious. And the obvious is not something that I want to be involved with, or frankly that Israel wants to be involved with, if they can avoid it.” Again, Mr. Netanyahu said nothing, as Mr. Trump, voluble and dominating, barely let him get a word in.
Mr. Trump added: “So we are going to see if we can avoid it, but it’s getting to be very dangerous territory, and hopefully those talks will be successful.”
Mr. Trump is, to some degree, solving a problem of his own making. The 2015 nuclear accord resulted in Iran shipping out of the country 97 percent of its enriched uranium, leaving small amounts in the country, and the equipment needed to produce nuclear fuel. President Barack Obama and his top aides said at the time that the deal was the best they could extract. But it left Iran with the equipment and the know-how to rebuild after Mr. Trump pulled out of the accord, and today it has enough fuel to produce upward of six nuclear weapons in relatively short order.
How long that would take is a matter of dispute: The New York Times reported in early February that new intelligence indicated a secret team of Iranian scientists was exploring a faster, if cruder approach to developing an atomic weapon. Mr. Trump has presumably since been briefed on those findings, which came at the end of the Biden administration, and they have added urgency to the talks. Administration officials say they will not engage in a prolonged negotiation with Tehran.
Mr. Trump’s surprise announcement of what he called a “top level” meeting on Monday exploded in Iranian media. Some Iranians reacted with enthusiasm, saying on social media that they hoped the negotiations would resolve their economic woes and avert the threat of war, which has become acute in recent months.
“The way we see it, Trump’s comments about negotiations were a clear and strong signal to both Israel and Iran,” Mehdi Rahmati, a conservative political analyst close to the government, said in a telephone interview from Tehran. “He is putting the brakes on Israel’s plan for military strikes and he is openly sending a positive pulse to Iran that he favors diplomacy and wants to resolve our problems.”
Earlier in the day, the foreign ministry spokesman Esmeil Bagheri told Iranian media, “Iran’s offer for indirect negotiations was a generous and wise offer, considering the history of the issue and the trends related to nuclear negotiations in the past decade. We are focused on what we offer.”
That Iran is coming to the table at all seems to be a recognition of its vastly weakened state. Its nuclear facilities have never been this vulnerable. And in addition to striking Iran’s air defenses in October, Israel also destroyed the missile-production facilities where Iran mixes rocket fuel. So Iran’s ability to produce new missiles has been temporarily limited.
But it is entirely possible, nuclear experts say, that the maximum Iran feels it can give will come nowhere near the demand that Mr. Trump’s national security adviser, Michael Waltz, has talked about: the full dismantlement of its nuclear facilities.
That would mean an end to the Natanz nuclear enrichment site, which the United States and Israel attacked with the Stuxnet cyber weapon 15 years ago, and which Israel has episodically sabotaged since. It would mean destroying the Fordow enrichment site, deep under a mountain on a military base. And it would mean taking apart a range of other facilities, spread across the country, under the eye of international negotiators.
If Mr. Trump does not achieve full dismantlement, he will be forced to confront questions about whether he got anything more than the Obama administration got a decade ago. Mr. Trump dismissed that accord as a “disaster” and an embarrassment, noting it would lift all restrictions on Iran’s nuclear production by 2030.
Now his challenge, experts say, will be accomplishing more than Mr. Obama did.