Trump says he 'obliterated' Iran's nuclear programme. So does he need a deal?

Middle East Eye

10 hours ago

US President Donald Trump says he doesn't need a nuclear agreement with Iran, but the fact is that Iran, Israel and the United States are all back to posturing for talks after a nasty 12-day conflict between the two arch foes culminated in the US bombing three Iranian nuclear facilities over the weekend.
Iran's foreign minister on Wednesday hinted that his country could pull out of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). Iran's tightly controlled parliament symbolically voted to ban inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) from the country.
Current and former US officials tell Middle East Eye they are reading the Iranian moves as setting up bargaining chips for negotiations that Trump said will take place next week.
Not to be outdone, Trump, a self-declared master negotiator, is playing it cool. On Wednesday, he said the US's "obliteration" of Iran's nuclear sites made a deal with Iran a moot point, but he would talk to the Islamic Republic anyway.
'The only thing we would be asking for is what we were asking for before…we want no nuclear, but we destroyed the nuclear… it's blown up to kingdom come. I don't care very strongly about it. If we got a document, it wouldn't be bad,' Trump said on the sidelines of a Nato summit in the Hague, Netherlands.
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Israel is also positioning itself. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claimed the war was a 'historic victory' for Israel. His office said on Wednesday that Iran's Fordow uranium enrichment facility had been rendered 'inoperable' by US strikes.
Signalling and damage assessments
As the dust settles from the conflict, everyone is scrambling to understand how much damage the US strikes did to Iran's nuclear programme - and it's led to a number of strange developments.
For example, the Trump administration has cited the Islamic Republic of Iran as a source to push back against American media leaks that claim US strikes did little to knock out Iran's nuclear facilities.
On Wednesday, Iran's foreign ministry spokesman Esmail Baghaei said the country's nuclear facilities had been 'badly damaged' by the American strikes. That's not quite as conclusive as Trump's claim that they had been 'blown up to kingdom come".
Trump doesn't think Iran deal needed after facilities 'blown up to kingdom come' Read More »
The discrepancy is part and parcel of battle damage assessments, current and former US officials tell MEE. BDAs are open to political interpretation and manipulation. It's never-ending,' one US official told MEE.
The conflict, which saw missiles rain down on Tel Aviv, and Israel obtain control over Iran's skies, took a head-spinning turn after the US joined Israel in offensive operations.
An Arab official previously told MEE that Iran had received advance warning of the US strikes on its Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan nuclear facilities. Amwaj Media first reported that Tehran was notified before the US attacked.
MEE later reported that Iran carefully choreographed its response to the US attack, with enough signalling that the US knew to move its warplanes and heavy equipment out of al-Udeid air base before Iran shot 14 ballistic missiles at the base. It was the same number of bunker buster bombs the US dropped on Fordow.
Trump confirmed the warning and thanked Iran profusely for it.
Trump still wants a deal
The urgency of nuclear talks might say more about the damage done to Iran's programme and its willingness to advance enrichment than any battle damage assessment. Trump has 43 months left in office - enough time to ride out Iran if his assessment of total obliteration is correct.
'Trump could probably forget about the programme the rest of his presidency,' Frank Lowenstein, a former Middle East negotiator in the Obama administration, told MEE.
'But Trump would still like to be able to say that he got a deal,' Lowenstein said.
'Trump would still like to be able to say that he got a deal'
- Frank Lowenstein, former Mena negotiator
But Trump's own vice president, JD Vance, has conceded that strikes on Fordow and Natanz aside, the administration does not know the whereabouts of Iran's 60 percent enriched uranium.
'We are going to work in the coming weeks to ensure that we do something with that fuel, and that's one of the things that we're going to have conversations with the Iranians about,' Vance told ABC on Sunday.
Rafael Mariano Grossi, the director of the IAEA, admitted that his team lost track of the fuel that could be turned into nuclear weapons a week before Israel began its attacks, and that he believed the material was protected.
Dennis Ross, who served as a senior official on Middle East issues in Democratic and Republican administrations, told MEE that to 'cement any achievement', Trump still needs a negotiated understanding with the Iranians.
"Without an agreement, there is no way to know that the Iranians have given up the nuclear weapons option. That is especially true with the Iranians having secreted away their highly enriched uranium,' said Ross, now with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
Nuclear deal or 'never-ending' war
Iran has yet to announce that it will give up enriching uranium, the big stumbling block to talks before Israel's attack.
One former US intelligence official told MEE that the only other option to a nuclear agreement would be some sort of 'never-ending Middle East war'.
Indeed, Lowenstein said that the option Israel appears to be on track for is to manage Iran like Lebanon or Syria. In the former, Israel has enforced a ceasefire on Iran's ally Hezbollah, and in the latter, Israel bombarded remnants of Bashar al-Assad's armed forces.
But in Lebanon, Israel has the Lebanese Armed Forces working to disarm Hezbollah with the support of a wide swath of the population, including the country's prime minister and president. Meanwhile, Syria is war-ravaged.
'The Israelis could police the status quo. But that means blowing up every Russian delivery of air defences to Iran as it looks to rebuild its defences,' Lowenstein said. 'At some point, too, Iran will conduct a purge and plug the intelligence holes Israel exploited. This Israeli operation was 20 years in the making."
US and Arab officials say that before Israel's attack, the US and Iran had engaged in fruitful negotiations. One fresh compromise discussed between the two sides was for a nuclear consortium that Iran could join with Arab states.
Leverage
As the two sides prepare to sit down again, the question will be who has gained more leverage following the conflict.
Jonathan Panikoff, a former senior US intelligence official now at The Atlantic Council, said the conflict had 'significantly increased the US's leverage'.
He said it had undermined the last two pillars of Iran's three-tiered defence system. The first, proxies, was undermined with Israel's takedown of Hezbollah and the collapse of the Assad government in Syria. Israel also destroyed Iran's air defence systems and, more importantly, its ballistic missile launching platforms. By Iran's own admission, its nuclear programme had been 'badly damaged'.
'The proxies, nuclear programme and ballistic missiles have all been diminished,' Panikoff told MEE. 'There was always scepticism in Tehran whether or not Trump, or any US president, would ever actually bomb the nuclear facilities. Now it's not theoretical. They know if the US sees them starting to rebuild, they are almost sure to invite a US or Israeli strike.'
What Iran achieved during the conflict with Israel Read More »
The flip side is that, having been the first Middle Eastern state to withstand a full-scale conflict with Israel since 1973, Iran is emboldened.
'Without a deal, Israel and the US are committing themselves to maintaining that Iran does not have air superiority anymore and can strike it at will. Is that sustainable or will it just drive Iran's nuclear programme underground?' Lowenstein said.
Iran insists its nuclear programme is for civilian purposes. Before the conflict, experts said Iran was weeks away from enriching 60 percent uranium to 90 percent weapons-grade. But Iran would then have to make a bomb and then put it on a warhead, a process that could take much longer.
In addition, in 2003, Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, issued a religious ruling or fatwa that has prevented the country from developing nuclear weapons. That ruling stands.
The main hurdle to the talks before Israel's attack was whether Iran would be able to continue enriching uranium on its soil in return for sanctions relief. With Iran, Israel and the US in a baseline agreement that the programme is badly damaged, this could leave open space for a compromise.
Iran is also keen to prevent the return of so-called snapback sanctions. These multinational and United Nations sanctions were lifted on Iran as part of the 2015 Obama nuclear deal.
Despite the Trump administration's unilateral withdrawal from the agreement in 2018, the sanctions remain paused, but that is due to expire in October without an agreement at the UN Security Council.
'Trump is unlikely to soften his red lines, but he could accept some face-savers for Iran,' Ross told MEE. 'I can imagine the Iranians saying they need the right to enrich even if they won't implement it. However, they would need to know that should they then later try to act on the right, President Trump or his successor would respond forcefully to prevent it.'
However, having withstood the might of US and Israeli air power, the Iranians might not be in the mood for compromise.
'They proved they would rather be bombed than give up their uranium enrichment. They have come this far. Why go back now?' Lowenstein said.