US holds talks with Iran over its nuclear program

Preliminary diplomatic talks between U.S. and Iranian officials in Oman over Iran’s nuclear program ended Saturday with a handshake and with both sides describing them as constructive.

The next round of discussions, set for next Saturday, according to the officials, could lead to the first official face-to-face negotiations between the two countries under President Donald Trump since he withdrew the United States from a landmark nuclear accord seven years ago.

Trump has often been bellicose about Iran, and has said that the country should not be allowed to acquire a nuclear bomb. The talks reflect his threats-and-wooing approach to foreign conflicts, one in which the possibility of a deal is almost always on the table and drawn-out military conflict is unappealing.

For Iran, the first round of talks with the United States went as well as could be expected. Iran can claim that two of its main conditions for taking the negotiations to the next level were achieved: The U.S. kept the focus on Iran’s nuclear program — at least for now — and did not mention the dismantling of its nuclear facilities or its regional policy with proxy militant groups such as Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis.

The talks were, according to a senior U.S. official with knowledge of the matter, broad and aimed at maintaining a dialogue.

And so Trump’s special envoy, Steve Witkoff, who is leading the discussions, did not suggest that Iran abandon its enrichment program entirely, the official said. Instead, the focus was on the country not weaponizing its existing material.

Witkoff has almost no foreign policy experience. But as a yearslong friend of Trump’s, he has the president’s trust and the ability to be seen as speaking for him in a way other U.S. officials do not. He was joined this weekend by Ana Escrogima, the U.S. ambassador to Oman, for the preliminary talks with Abbas Araghchi, the Iran foreign minister, according to another White House official. Secretary of State Marco Rubio was not involved in Saturday’s talks.

In a statement, the official said that Witkoff had underscored to Araghchi that he had instructions from Trump to resolve the two nations’ differences through dialogue and diplomacy, if possible.

Araghchi and the White House official both said the talks between the two teams would resume next Saturday.

Speculation over whether the U.S. and Iranian envoys would meet directly or indirectly was settled by doing both. The Iranian and U.S. teams sat in separate rooms for the duration of the 2 1/2-hour negotiations, with the Omani foreign minister shuffling back and forth with written and oral messages. At the end, Witkoff and Araghchi met in person for a brief greeting as they were leaving the compound, Iran’s Foreign Ministry said.

“There were no sharp words used,” Araghchi told Iranian state television. “Both sides showed commitment to take these talks forward until we reach a deal that is favorable to both sides.”

Prior to the meeting, he had said the goal was to build trust and to reach an agreement on the framework and timeline for negotiations on the nuclear program. Iran had indicated that if the United States put full dismantlement of its nuclear program on the table, it would walk away from the talks.

The talks began midafternoon in Muscat, the Omani capital, which U.S. and Iranian diplomats have used as neutral negotiating territory for years.

The two sides came in with deep distrust, given that Trump walked away from the 2015 accord that Iran had brokered with the United States and other world powers and then imposed harsh sanctions on Iran during his first term.

Trump now wants to strike a deal — both to showcase his negotiating skills and to keep simmering tensions between Iran and Israel from escalating into a more intense conflict that would further roil the Middle East.

“I want Iran to be a wonderful, great, happy country, but they can’t have a nuclear weapon,” he told reporters Friday night aboard Air Force One.

Iranian officials were skeptical, but open to “a chance for an initial understanding that would mark a path for the negotiations,” Araghchi said Saturday before the talks began.

In recent weeks, Trump sent a letter to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, saying he would rather find a way to forge a deal than escalate a military campaign. If such a deal could not be reached in the coming weeks, Trump said, Iran may face a military campaign against its facilities. Trump received a letter back saying the moment to talk had arrived.

The Iranian delegation had planned to convey that it was open to talking about scaling back uranium enrichment and allowing outside monitoring of its nuclear activity, according to two senior Iranian officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive matter. But they said that the negotiators were not interested in discussing the dismantlement of the nuclear program, which some Trump administration officials, including Michael Waltz, the national security adviser, have insisted on and may push Trump to consider.

Witkoff, however, has publicly suggested a different so-called red line, telling The Wall Street Journal that such a marker would be the development of a nuclear weapon. He indicated that it would not be the enrichment program itself.

At issue is the dwindling power of the original nuclear deal, which European leaders have kept limping along since 2018, when Trump withdrew the United States. The deal’s most punishing restrictions expire in October.

Known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action and completed under President Barack Obama, the accord was the result of years of painstaking and technical negotiations that lifted international sanctions against Iran in exchange for limits on its nuclear program.

Only nine countries are known to have nuclear weapons, and adding Iran to the list could pose an existential threat to its main adversary, Israel, and other nations. Experts also have raised concerns that Iran could share its nuclear capabilities with terrorist groups.

Iran has long maintained that its nuclear activities are legal and meant only for civilian purposes, like energy and medicine. But it has highly enriched uranium, beyond the levels necessary for civilian use, that can be used to make a nuclear warhead.

In the years since Trump withdrew from the nuclear accord, Iran has steadily accelerated uranium enrichment to the point where some experts estimate that it could soon build a nuclear weapon. Its economy has crumbled under U.S. sanctions, and Trump this past week imposed new measures targeting Iran’s oil trade.

Israel’s government worries that Iran will expand its nuclear program, and is pushing to destroy it.

“The deal with Iran is acceptable only if the nuclear sites are destroyed under U.S. supervision,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel said this past week. “Otherwise, the military option is the only choice.”

Ali Vaez, the Iran director of the International Crisis Group, said that the meeting Saturday had been about format and scope, and that the two sides would soon delve into technical negotiations — the hard part of talks.

“This shows that Iran and the U.S. are likely on the same page with regards to the end game in these negotiations, and thus could be in the same room moving forward,” Vaez said. “If dismantling was the floor for the U.S. team, the ceiling would have collapsed on these negotiations.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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