A wary re-engagement between Washington and Tehran began on Saturday with 2½ hours of talks in Muscat, most of which were spent with the Omani foreign minister passing messages between the US and Iranian delegations sitting in separate rooms.
This was never likely to produce a big breakthrough. However, the two sides did agree to reconvene next week, and the Iranian foreign minister claimed that the talks were conducted “in a constructive atmosphere and based on mutual respect”. The White House called the discussions “positive and constructive”. Oman described the atmosphere as “conducive to bridging viewpoints”. That was as positive an outcome as could be expected.
If the two sides are to make progress they will need to pick up speed. President Trump is reported to have allowed two months for a diplomatic solution to be found to the Iranian nuclear programme. To encourage the Iranians to be more forthcoming, he has warned that if the talks fail there should be no doubt that he is prepared to authorise military action. If he does, he says, “it’ll be a very bad day for Iran”. Such threats are one reason why Iran has approached these talks with caution.
The previous agreement negotiated ten years ago by President Obama, backed by an international coalition, meant that Iran would halt its uranium enrichment in return for sanctions relief.
In his first term Trump abandoned this deal on the grounds that it was not tough enough and the relief allowed Iran to pursue its hostile activities in the region. He brought in a campaign of “maximum pressure”, essentially harsher economic sanctions than before. Predictably this failed.
Instead Iran pressed ahead with enriching uranium to a level suitable for weapons, although it did not abandon the deal completely. It now has enough for some six bombs and will take months, not years, to manufacture its first weapons. Adding to the urgency of the situation, Britain, France, and Germany, still parties to the deal, have warned that if Iran continues with enrichment, they will reintroduce sanctions at the United Nations in October in a way permitted by the agreement that neither Russia nor China can veto.
It would have been better to have stuck with Obama’s deal. There are now limits on what the diplomatic route can achieve. The Americans have demanded that the Iranians dismantle all their nuclear infrastructure plus their long-range missiles, and cease their support of “terrorist networks”. Tehran will not agree to that. The only apparent basis for a fruitful discussion is a more modest objective of agreeing far more stringent verification measures to demonstrate that Iran is not yet constructing weapons. Both the US envoy Steve Witkoff and the Iranian foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, have hinted that this might be one way forward.
This will not satisfy Binyamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, who has insisted that only full elimination of the Iranian programme will suffice, and has long argued that military strikes are the sole means to achieve this. But this is not a straightforward task. Iran has developed its nuclear programme in the full knowledge that it may be attacked at some point. Its key sites, especially those connected with fuel enrichment, have therefore been hidden, hardened and dispersed, and are now protected by elaborate air defences.
Neither the Israelis nor the Americans are likely to be too troubled by the air defences but they would still need to be suppressed to enable the main targets to be attacked. To destroy one of the enrichment plants would involve a series of super-powerful bunker-blaster bombs penetrating as much as 100 metres of rock and dense concrete. Should they reach the actual facility deep underground, the effects of a single explosion could still be limited, depending on how the enrichment activity is organised.
It might therefore be necessary for the attacking force to return a number of times to the same targets. To be sure of destroying the facilities hundreds of aircraft might be needed and many expensive weapons used up. This would therefore involve a sustained campaign over some time. And then as the Iranians could be expected to replace what had been lost, there would be the possibility that they would have to repeat the exercise at a later date.
Trump has suggested that if military action was taken Israel would take the lead with US support, although as always he was not wholly clear. Last October Israel demonstrated that its aircraft could reach Iran, knock out air defences and damage one nuclear facility. Taking out the whole programme would be a quite different matter. It would need considerable American backup including air refuelling and even more powerful bombs than those Israel already has. In practice it would be hard for the US to be involved and not take the lead. They would not wish to be associated with an operation that had not quite succeeded.
The Iranian leadership has threatened a response. During Trump’s first term it sabotaged tankers in the Gulf, mounted missile and drone attacks on Saudi Arabia’s oil infrastructure and fired missiles at American troops in Iraq. Two things have changed since then. First, Iran has mended relations with the Gulf states, including the Saudis, who will not want to get involved. Second, its regional proxies, notably Hamas and Hezbollah, have been severely weakened as a result of the war with Israel. There are still the Houthis in Yemen, who have been subject to regular US strikes since mid-March but have shown considerable resilience.
So while Iranian leaders have threatened missile strikes in response to any attack, as a matter of honour, the most significant response would be to move as quickly as possible to recover the programme and start building bombs, assuming sufficient capabilities survive any attack. Constant threats against Iran, and occasional strikes, may well convince Tehran that its own deterrent is essential.
There is no certain military solution to this problem. A diplomatic solution is possible but would require substantial compromises. Iran does have an interest in a deal. Its economy is in terrible shape, and the clerical regime is deeply unpopular. Its anti-Israeli “axis of resistance” has been attenuated and the Assad regime in Syria, which it had helped sustain, is gone. Trump would like to have one foreign policy success to brag about but would need to accept a deal that looks far less impressive than the one achieved by Obama a decade ago.
Sir Lawrence Freedman is emeritus professor of war studies at King’s College London and the co-author of the Substack Comment is Freed
