Art of the (Iran) deal

0:01Representatives from the U.S. and Iran sat down last weekend to try to strike a deal on Iran's nuclear program. These were the highest level talks between the two countries since 2018. And the big surprise is that they're going to meet again this coming Saturday. President Trump in the Oval Office yesterday was asked about Iran, and he said this. Iran has to get rid of the concept of a nuclear weapon. They cannot have a nuclear weapon. He can't have a nuclear weapon. Then he said this. I want them to be a rich, great nation. Circling back, he said this. They're not going to have one. And if we have to do something very harsh, we'll do it.

0:36Maybe it's the weave, but President Trump seems to have profoundly mixed feelings about Iran. He believes that Iran tried to kill him last fall, and the Department of Justice agreed and filed charges. But Trump is also reaching out to Iran in some ways that have Iran watchers thinking he might be very serious about making a deal. That's coming up on Today Explained.

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2:23My name is Alex Eisenstadt. I'm a senior political reporter at Axios, and I'm the author of Revenge, the inside story of Trump's return to power, which is an inside look at Trump's 2024 campaign. Let's go back to the first Trump administration and to two moments that appeared at the time to be really definitive on Iran. The U.S. and Iran did have a nuclear deal, and then President Trump pulled out of it. Why did he do that? So the nuclear deal that President Obama signed on to was something that was a huge priority for Obama and his administration. Today, after two years of negotiations, the United States, together with our international partners, has achieved something that decades of animosity has not.

3:10A comprehensive, long-term deal with Iran that will prevent it from obtaining a nuclear weapon. It basically decreased economic sanctions on Iran in exchange for having more oversight of Iran's nuclear capabilities. Iran must complete key nuclear steps before it begins to receive new sanctions relief. And over the course of the next decade, Iran must abide by the deal before additional sanctions are lifted. What Trump decided to do was do away with that. I am announcing today that the United States will withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal. And basically, Trump increased economic sanctions on Iran as a means of putting maximum pressure on the country.

4:01The deal allowed Iran to continue enriching uranium and over time reach the brink of a nuclear breakout. The deal lifted crippling economic sanctions on Iran in exchange for very weak limits on the regime's nuclear activity. There was a sense that Trump's move wasn't necessarily needed and that he was guided by Iran hawks within his administration, people like Mike Pompeo and John Bolton, both of whom were advocates of a much stricter approach towards Iran. OK, so tensions in 2018 go higher after Trump pulls out of the Iran deal. And then in early 2020, there was kind of a shocker of an assassination.

4:51Breaking news. In a major escalation in tensions between the U.S. and Iran, the top Iranian general has been killed in an airstrike while leaving the Baghdad airport. In the heart of Iran, a public outpouring of grief overwhelming the streets of its capital. Trump made a big mistake. Tell us what happened with Qasem Soleimani. So Trump ordered the assassination of Qasem Soleimani, who basically is the second most important leader in Iran next to the Ayatollah. And what it did was it highlighted Trump's desire to take a very aggressive posture towards Iran. And if you remember, in the immediate aftermath, there was actually concern in the United States that there might be some retaliatory action that Iran could take.

5:37In fact, it did. It launched a strike on U.S. interests in Iraq.

5:47Good evening. We're coming on the air with breaking news. The Pentagon confirming that Iran has launched a series of ballistic missiles targeting American forces in Iraq. But at the time, it was something that was really surprising to people. Well, Iran has confirmed that it has launched what is a conventional strike firing. more than a dozen ballistic missiles from inside Iranian territory at bases that house American personnel. Me and my partner, we hit the floor and we felt the big boom. OK, so now let's move into the present day. Your book, Revenge, contains some really shocking information about what was happening in 2024 while Donald Trump was running for office.

6:35there were concerns that Iran was trying to kill him. What happened? This was something that was picked up within the confines of U.S. intelligence and the Secret Service that they were aware of that they wanted to kill Trump in retaliation for Soleimani. And this is something that was an issue as soon as Trump left the White House, went back to his home in Palm Beach, Florida, basically. And so as the campaign continued into 2024, the threat of Iran was something that became really intense. And Trump's campaign was attacked by Iranian hackers. And at the same time, there was an increasing threat that Iran would try to kill him.

7:22And in the summer of 2024, Secret Service agents sat down with Trump and they warned him that Iran had teams of agents within the United States that had access to surface-to-air missiles, that those surface-to-air missiles could be used to conceivably down his plane, either upon takeoff or upon landing. Do we know how Trump responded to this? His campaign devised at one point a plan, which was to have Trump fly in a plane of a donor by the name of Steve Whitcoff, who, of course, is now ironically playing an incredibly important role in terms of U .S. foreign policy overseas, including overseeing negotiations with Iran.

8:06I was appointed by President Trump to be the special envoy for peace in the Middle East. And so Steve Wyckoff has a G6 Gulfstream jet. And so Trump and his top aides devised a plan where Trump would be on the plane of Steve Wyckoff. And then other aides would be on Trump Force One, which the so-called Trump Force One, which is the plane that Trump typically used. And the idea was to essentially turn Trump Force One into a decoy plane. Well, this is something that did not sit well, as you can imagine, among Trump aides who were on the plane that day. And so they got on the plane. They got on the plane that day.

8:49And all of them were wondering, where is Trump, right? And then a senior member of leadership tells them, look, the boss isn't going to be flying with us today. He's on another plane. And this is just a practice dry run for how things are going to go in the future. This did not go over well with the aides. They felt like they were being treated as bait. And at the time, they were really concerned about the threat of Iran, that they could be attacked as well. In fact, there was one aide who was told by a Secret Service agent at one point that upon getting on the plane, that they should duck. They should duck their heads down out of fear that there might be an assassin somewhere pointing a rifle at them.

9:32President Trump and the people surrounding him were legitimately terrified that he could be killed. Do we know ultimately how far this went? I mean, if at the time there were people in the United States with access to surface-to-air missiles, we would have to assume that they're still here? What we do know is that there was someone connected to the Iranian regime who was arrested in connection for having a part of a plot to kill President Trump. And so who was then candidate Trump at the time. And so we do know that Iran was very interested in this. And we also know that Iran did succeed in hacking into the campaign's computer system.

10:19And so in a lot of ways, Iran was very aggressive during the 2024 campaign season. Does the Trump administration today, as we speak, do they still worry about Iran and a threat to the president's life? You know, it's not something that they've talked about as much recently. Trump was in greater danger as a former president when you had less security protection. It was the threat to Trump and the vulnerabilities he faced really reached a kind of a climax in the summer of 2024 after the two assassination attempts. Trump was so afraid of Iran that on the campaign trail, he used to boast about his killing of Soleimani.

11:08He actually started talking about it less and less over the course of the campaign. The second thing that happened was he started to ask about the staging of events. And that was another thing he was thinking about. Susie Wiles, who was Trump's co-campaign manager at the time, now is chief of staff, was reaching out to the White House, then the Biden White House, asking for greater Secret Service assets. That's how great the concern was about Trump's safety at the time. Now that Trump's president and he has much more security assets behind him, there's a lot less concern about where he is from a safety standpoint.

11:49But that doesn't mean that they're not concerned about his safety at all points. That's always the concern about a president. But in the summer of 2024, it really reached its heights. Alex Eisenstadt, this was great. Thank you so much for your time and your insights. We really appreciate this. Thank you.

12:14Alex's book is called Revenge. Now, we should note that in January, a week before Inauguration Day, Iran's president, Masoud Pazeshkian, gave an interview to NBC's Lester Holt in which he denied that Iran had ever tried to assassinate Donald Trump.

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16:07This is Today Explained. I'm Noelle King. So the big news from this first round of Iran talks is that there will be a second round of talks this coming weekend. Trita Parsi, who joins us now, was not as surprised as many analysts. Trita is executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. He's also the author of several books about U.S. foreign policy in Iran. And Trita has been writing that there are real reasons to be optimistic about these talks. And he says this past weekend proves his point. I think what went really right is that both sides recognize that they need a deal and that to get a deal, they need to have reasonable demands and not go for this type of maximalist approach that oftentimes has been the case.

16:54Both sides have politics in their countries that is very unforgiving of any type of a compromise with Iran or with the United States. But Trump is very different in that sense. He doesn't really care what the political establishment in Washington thinks about these things. I think he's very eager to get some sort of a deal because it's kind of part of his persona to be a dealmaker. And the Iranians recognize this. So the opportunity for the Iranians to actually strike a deal is frankly greater now than it was ever during the Biden administration, because Biden, according to his own envoy, Rob Malley, was at best lukewarm towards getting a deal.

17:36And if you're lukewarm towards getting a deal, you're not going to get the deal. How far away are the US and Iran on an agreement? Like, what is a sticking point here or these sticking points here? Do we know? Well, a primary sticking point would be if Trump had adopted the position that the Israelis had pressed on him and pro-Israeli voices in Washington press, which is they want to see the complete dismantlement of the Iranian nuclear program. The reason why that is a problematic demand is because it will never be accepted by the Iranians. The United States essentially would have to go to war to achieve that objective, which incidentally is exactly what the Israelis want.

18:14They are deliberately pushing a line that they know will be rejected in order to pave the way for Trump having to then escalate matters towards a military conflict. But Trump seems to have rejected that demand and instead is focusing on how he can limit the Iranian program with restrictions, inspections and verification. And by that, ensure that Iran can never build a nuclear weapon, which incidentally is exactly what Obama did. Yes, Obama struck a deal with Iran in 2015. President Trump in his first term pulled out of it. Since Trump exited that deal in 2018, how much progress has Iran made on its nuclear program?

18:56The Iranians have made significant progress, which is part of the challenge that Trump now has to deal with, but it's also, frankly, out of his own making. Had he not pulled out of the deal, the situation would have been very, very different right now. When Obama started serious negotiations with the Iranians, if the Iranians had made a decision to build a bomb, it would take them eight to 12 weeks to have the material for a bomb, the fissile material. It doesn't mean that they would have a bomb. It probably would take them another two years to build a bomb, test the bomb, etc. But to have the material, they were eight to 12 weeks away.

19:31As a result of the JCPOA, they would always be a minimum of 12 months away from having the material for Obama. So he pushed the breakout time from eight to 12 weeks to 12 months. Today, Iran's breakout time is somewhere between three and seven days because of the dramatic progress they've made in the program, because Trump walked out of the deal and the Iranians then stopped respecting the restrictions of the deal since the U.S. no longer was in the deal. You recently wrote a very good piece for Time magazine in which you said you are optimistic that a deal is possible here for three reasons. Walk through those three reasons for me, beginning with your first.

20:12Both sides, as you said, have strong incentives to reach a deal. What are the incentives you're talking about? Well, from the Iranian side, they need sanctions relief. Their economy is in a terrible shape. The country's official inflation rate hovers at around 35 percent, and the local currency, the rial, is on a nosedive. There were at least 216 demonstrations across Iran in February. The protests are largely focused on economic hardships, including low wages and months of unpaid salaries. I don't think we're in a situation in which the regime is fearing regime collapse necessarily, because Iran's economy has been in a bad shape for quite some time.

20:53It's a tremendously unpopular regime. But those are not sufficient ingredients in order to get a revolution. There needs to be a credible opposition. There needs to be political organization, leadership. None of those things exist. But nevertheless, the Iranians cannot thrive. They can just survive. And surviving is not enough. If they really want to be able to modernize their country, they need to get sanctions relief from the United States. The rest of the region is advancing way ahead of Iran in that regard. And from the American side, Trump really does not want to get into another war in the Middle East.

21:31And if this issue isn't resolved, mindful of how far the Iranians advance their program, this is going to lead to some sort of a military confrontation. And Trump also wants to leave the Middle East militarily. He doesn't want to have 50 ,000 troops there. And a key factor that has kept the U.S. in the region is the enmity between the United States and Iran. If that can be pacified, it also paves the way for American troops to be able to come back home.

22:02Reason number two you cited, you say that Donald Trump appears to not be following Israel's lead here. What do you mean by that? Why does that make you optimistic? Well, when Trump summoned Netanyahu to the White House, Netanyahu pushed for what he called the Libya-style solution, which means that the entire nuclear program would be destroyed and dismantled. This is what Libyan dictator Gaddafi did. And of course, eight or so years later, he was disposed. So the very idea that that would be an attractive option for the Iranians is somewhat laughable. Netanyahu is pushing this line precisely because he knows it won't work, but it will leave Trump in a position in which he will have to escalate after he has failed.

22:48But Trump seems to recognize this and he has decided not to go down this path. He keeps on saying his only red line is no nuclear weapons. Iran has to get rid of the concept of a nuclear weapon. They cannot have a nuclear weapon. He can't have a nuclear weapon. Nobody can have it. We can't have anybody have a nuclear weapon. And you can achieve that much easier, actually, by having a verification program, a deal that is based on inspections, restrictions and verification that ensures that the Iranians simply cannot build it. And you don't have to go to war and Trump doesn't want to go to war. And rightly so, in my view, a war with Iran would be a disaster for the region, for Iran, but also for the United States.

23:30The third reason you cite is that Tehran has been making some interesting overtures to the United States regarding investment. Tell us what Iran's leaders have been saying and what you think it is they're offering exactly. The Iranians are saying that their economy is not closed to American companies because of Iranian decisions, but because of sanctions. That's up until recently not entirely true.

24:00Hardliners in Iran could live with a nuclear deal. They could live with a deal with the United States, but they did not want to see American companies entering the Iranian market because they feared, perhaps quite correctly, that once American companies are in Iran, there would also be some degree of American influence in Iran. And eventually, the hardliners would lose control over power. Now they have shifted their position. And I think a key reason as to why they're shifting their position is because they recognize secondary sanctions relief, meaning lifting the sanctions on Europeans and Chinese, etc., actually doesn't work.

24:35Most companies will not go into the Iranian market unless they know that they're not doing anything differently from what American companies are doing. Because they know that if American companies are in the Iranian market, the likelihood that the Europeans eventually would get sanctioned is far less. Now, what's interesting with all of this is that Trump is the kind of president that actually cares about this. He wants to expand American markets. This would never have worked with Biden. And it didn't work with Obama. Obama didn't want to go that far, fearing that this would have generated an even stronger backlash from Republicans in Congress against the JCPOA.