John Irish

Precisely. And let’s game this out further. In one scenario, the U.S. and Iran sit at the table for another year plus and hammer out these (very important) details on the nuclear issue. The traditional negotiating model. That seems unlikely. Trump won’t go for that and frankly I’m not sure the Iranians would either. In another, more likely scenario, there is a high level agreement that is then kicked to lower level teams to work out the details. How’s that conversation gonna go when Iran wants to keep all the centrifuges, build in a timeline for R&D and gradual ramp up, push back on intrusive inspections, etc—all arguably within the bounds of a high level agreement on enrichment suspension, or at least not explicitly out of bounds? My guess is not well given Trump’s vision of “no enrichment” and pressures on the administration. Relatedly, if it’s not clear as part of that high level deal that Iran has to pause all nuclear activity (ie, not build back) while detailed talks are underway, we could find ourselves back in the old cycle of Iran building up its capabilities for negotiating leverage to extract further concessions. In this scenario, there’s a very high likelihood that talks break down, and we’re back to square one. In a third scenario, there’s a high level agreement, but the Trump administration essentially declares victory and moves on. That’s also incredibly worrying as Iran would have a free hand to do quite a bit on the program without formally enriching. And there’s nothing to prevent Trump from waking up one day and deciding Iran had gone too far and crossed some red line that wasn’t explicitly agreed. All this to say, there seems to be a lot of optimism around the U.S. and Iran closing this gap on enrichment suspension timelines and HEU. Will they get there? Maybe. But there are many other details that would need to be worked out to make this a strong, verifiable agreement, creating plenty of room for things to go south in the medium term.