early plan to essentially stage a coup<\/a>, overthrowing the government, placing a former Iranian hard-line president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, into power, never materialized.<\/p>\nIf the strait does reopen, Mr. Trump\u2019s aides say they are planning to enter a second phase to get back to a serious negotiation with the Iranians on the issues that triggered the war. A senior administration official, who declined to be named, told reporters on Sunday that the Iranians had already generally agreed to turn over their 60-percent enriched uranium \u2014 the stockpile that could be converted to a dozen or so bombs in relatively short order.<\/p>\n
But the Iranians have said nothing about surrendering that fuel, which along with its power to shut off traffic in the strait is their best leverage. The U.S. official also conceded the exact mechanism by which Iran would dispose of their highly enriched uranium remains unresolved as does whether Iran, at the end of the negotiation, will ship out all of the additional uranium in its possession, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency.<\/p>\n
The United States also said the Iranians had agreed, verbally, to some kind of suspension of enrichment of new nuclear fuel. But Mr. Trump himself told reporters nine days ago on Air Force One that Tehran\u2019s leaders had backed away from a commitment to suspend that activity for 20 years, and it is unclear where they are on the issue now.<\/p>\n
And Iran has so far refused to even discuss limits on the size and range of their missiles which the United States had said it would insist upon. That is a critical issue to the Israelis, who are within reach of many of Iran\u2019s ballistic missiles.<\/p>\n
Despite the confidence from the United States that all those issues would be resolved, it seemed possible that the negotiations and fragile cease-fire could collapse at any point. The U.S. official briefing reporters on Sunday repeatedly acknowledged they could not predict what Iran would ultimately agree to, or even if the supreme leader would formally sign off.<\/p>\n
But the official said the reopening of the strait, which would not include any Iranian tolls, would remove the economic pressure, reassure the markets and create space to address the nuclear issues. The official did not say how the United States would deal with Iran\u2019s claim over the past three months that it now has sovereignty over the strait, which had been traversed as international waters.<\/p>\n
But the official did say that the agreement with the Trump administration amounted to a \u201cwalk-back\u201d by the Iranians, because they will not be charging tolls.<\/p>\n
Mr. Trump only added to the doubts on Sunday afternoon, when he declared on social media that \u201cIf I make a deal with Iran, it will be a good and proper one, not like the one made by Obama,\u201d in 2015, which curtailed Iran\u2019s nuclear activity, but did not eliminate it.<\/p>\n
\u201cOur deal is the exact opposite, but nobody has seen it, or knows what it is. It isn\u2019t even fully negotiated yet,\u201d he acknowledged. \u201cSo don\u2019t listen to the losers, who are critical about something they know nothing about.\u201d<\/p>\n
Among the \u201closers” were prominent members of Mr. Trump\u2019s own party. Republican Iran hawks said he had folded to pressure, and failed to finish the job. Among the harshest critics was Senator Roger Wicker, Republican of Mississippi and chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, who had warned that \u201ceverything accomplished by Operation Epic Fury would be for naught!\u201d<\/p>\n
Mike Pompeo, Mr. Trump\u2019s first-term C.I.A. director and then his Secretary of State, was equally dismissive, leading Steven Cheung, the White House communications director, to declare on social media that Mr. Pompeo \u201cshould shut his stupid mouth and leave the real work to the professionals.\u201d<\/p>\n
Longtime negotiators who had opposed the attacks also had their doubts.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is what happens when a poorly conceived war of choice turns into a highly flawed \u2018peace\u2019 of necessity,\u201d Aaron David Miller, a former Mideast negotiator, now at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said on Sunday.<\/p>\n
\u201cOriginal, unrealizable war aims abandoned,\u201d he said, \u201cand now little leverage to secure what really matters \u2014 restraining Iran\u2019s nuclear capacity and permanently opened straits.\u201d<\/p>\n
Until a few days ago, the Trump administration was insisting it would not enter into any accord that did not deal with the hardest issue upfront: the nuclear program. But administration officials relented \u2014 in part because they needed to get the strait open and in part because they have come to recognize the complexity of negotiating on Iran\u2019s vast nuclear complex, a task that took the Obama administration nearly two years and resulted in a 160-page agreement.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou can\u2019t do a nuclear thing in 72 hours on the back of a napkin,\u201d Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in an interview in New Delhi, where he was on a diplomatic mission. \u201cThe straits have to be immediately reopened, and then we will enter, under agreed-to parameters, into very serious talks about enrichment, about the highly enriched uranium and about their pledge to never have nuclear weapons.\u201d<\/p>\n
When pressed on why Mr. Trump appeared to change course this time, the U.S. official said Iran was making significant accommodations, but the toughest decisions still lay ahead.<\/p>\n
Two remaining mysteries are how the United States will ultimately deal with Iranian demands to unfreeze billions of dollars of frozen Iranian funds, and lift years of sanctions placed on Iran to prevent it from selling oil or buying goods and technology.<\/p>\n
The U.S. official said those issues \u2014 among the most contentious for the cash-strapped Iranian government \u2014 had not even been addressed yet, though he held open the possibility that those could be part of a trade. \u201cNo dust, no dollars,\u201d the official said, a reference to Mr. Trump\u2019s repeated references to \u201cnuclear dust,\u201d his way of talking about the highly enriched uranium that is largely at the nuclear site at Isfahan that the United States bombed last June.<\/p>\n
Mr. Trump has suggested he would never give Iran back its cash, comparing himself to President Barack Obama, who returned $1.7 billion that Iran had paid for weapons in the 1970s that were never delivered.<\/p>\n
Mr. Obama \u201cgave Iran massive amounts of CASH, and a clear and open path to a Nuclear Weapon,\u201d Mr. Trump wrote Sunday on social media. \u201cOur deal is the exact opposite.\u201d But on those issues, there is no deal yet, at Mr. Trump himself acknowledged.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The temporary agreement that the Trump administration announced with Iran this weekend isn\u2019t a peace deal. It isn\u2019t…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":129782,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[3],"tags":[28452,2728,4064,43520,34,269,12619,101,392,4062,25779],"class_list":["post-129781","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-iran","tag-arms-control-and-limitation-and-disarmament","tag-assets","tag-donald-j","tag-frozen","tag-iran","tag-nuclear-weapons","tag-peace-process","tag-strait-of-hormuz","tag-trump","tag-united-states-international-relations","tag-united-states-politics-and-government"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@iran\/116634066991630822","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/129781","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=129781"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/129781\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/129782"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=129781"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=129781"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=129781"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}