Donald Trump has said he wants to negotiate a new deal with Iran to prevent its development of nuclear weapons and sent a letter to its leaders saying he hoped they would open talks.
It is the first practical step taken by the US president to see if new negotiations on Iran’s nuclear programme are possible.
Trump pulled the US out of the previous agreement – which imposed curbs on Iran’s nuclear program in return for sanctions relief – in 2018, and since then Tehran has built a stockpile of highly enriched uranium that is enough for use in multiple nuclear weapons.
“I’ve written them a letter, saying I hope you’re going to negotiate because if we have to go in militarily it’s going to be a terrible thing for them,” Trump told Fox Business in a clip broadcast on Friday.
“You can’t let them have a nuclear weapon.”
The letter appeared to have been addressed to Iran’s supreme leader, the 85-year-old Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has recently opposed negotiations with the US so long as economic sanctions are in force.
The Iranian foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, responded by saying: “We will not enter any direct negotiations with the US so long as they continue their maximum pressure policy and their threats.” But this formulation does not prevent talks through third parties such as Russia, as has occurred before during the Biden administration.
The Russian deputy foreign minister, Sergei Ryabkov, discussed international efforts to resolve the situation around Iran’s nuclear program with the Iranian ambassador, Kazem Jalali, the Russian foreign ministry said on Friday.
The Trump administration has previously suggested the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, had agreed to act as a mediator with Iran, and Russian diplomats have already been advising Trump to keep any negotiations with Iran limited to the nuclear issue.
The experienced Russian diplomat Mikhail Ulyanov earlier this week said Washington and Moscow had established a communication channel on Russia’s role as a mediator. He advised the US not to seek agreement on wider issues such as Iran’s missile program or its regional behaviour, a reference to its support to the resistance groups in the Middle East, also known as Iranian proxy forces. Ulyanov said it was not possible to kill three birds with one stone.
Trump’s strategy of reaching out to Russia would be enhanced if he could show a side benefit of his closer relations with Moscow was to reduce the growing risk of an Israeli attack on Iran to prevent Tehran acquiring nuclear weapons.
The letter, the first step Trump has taken towards Iran since he announced the US was seeking to reimpose maximum economic pressure on Iran, comes at a time when the Iranian government is locked in a public dispute on the wisdom of negotiating with the US, and what pre-conditions should be set.
In recent days hardliners opposed to reaching out to the US appeared to have gained a decisive upper hand with MPs impeaching the economy minister, Abdolnaser Hemmati, and the resignation of Javad Zarif, the vice-president for strategy and a long-term advocate of reviving contacts with the west.
The ministry of foreign affairs also issued a strategy paper stressing that Iran was not prepared to lose its political independence.
The paper said: “Governments that set their policies in the hope of security guarantees from great powers in the end at critical junctures were left alone. Iran has learned this historical lesson well. Independence is not just a slogan, but an inevitable necessity.”
The loss of such key ministers reflected both the hardliner parliament’s refusal to reconcile itself to the loss of the presidential election last year, and genuine public anger about the rapidly deteriorating state of the economy largely caused by the accumulation of years of economic sanctions.
Iranian politicians for months have been contradicting one another about the wisdom of talks, whether there could be direct discussions with the US and whether the talks should simply focus narrowly on reimposing a UN regime to oversee the safety of Iran’s civil nuclear program.
The last nuclear deal signed by Iran in 2015 and negotiated by the US, Russia, China, and three European powers, the UK, France and Germany, was fatally weakened in 2018 when Donald Trump pulled the US from the deal, and Europe said the breadth of US secondary sanctions meant European firms could not find a lawful way to continue trading with Iran.
Gradually Iran, claiming it was taking a legitimate reprisal measures for the failure to lift sanctions, ended cooperation with most aspects of the 2015 nuclear deal, including breaching all the limits on stockpiling highly enriched uranium, the key material to make nuclear weapons. Recent goodwill gestures to allow more experienced nuclear inspectors into Iran never took place.
A deadline of sorts is hanging over the process since the UN’s nuclear weapons inspectorate is due to publish a comprehensive report this summer that will set out the level of Iranian non-compliance with the nuclear inspectorate, a report that would then in October trigger currently suspended UN sanctions coming into force. Rafael Grossi, the International Atomic Energy Agency director, told the IAEA board this week that Iran’s stockpile of uranium enriched to 60% had reached 275kg. He said: “Iran is the only country that enriches uranium to this level without having nuclear weapons.”
