Just a few weeks ago, President Trump’s national security adviser, Michael Waltz, a longtime hawk on Iran, cast the administration’s goal in negotiations over Tehran’s nuclear program in crystal clear terms.
“Full dismantlement,” he said. He went on to list what that meant: Iran had to give up facilities for enriching nuclear fuel, for “weaponization” and even its long-range missiles.
But what sounded like a simple, tough-sounding goal on a Sunday talk show has started to unravel. In the past 24 hours, officials have left a contradictory and confusing set of messages, suggesting the administration might settle for caps on Iran’s activities — much as President Barack Obama did a decade ago — before backtracking on Tuesday.
Some of this may simply reflect inexperience in dealing with nuclear weapons programs. Mr. Trump’s chief negotiator is Steve Witkoff, a friend of the president’s who, as a New York developer like him, has spent a lifetime dealing with skyscrapers but only began delving into Iran’s underground nuclear centrifuges and suspected weapons labs a few weeks ago.
But the inconsistency also appears rooted in the splits inside Mr. Trump’s national security team as it grapples anew with one of the longest-lasting and most vexing problems in American foreign policy: How to stop Iran’s nuclear program without going to war over it. So far, the result is a blitz of mixed messages, conflicting signals and blustering threats, not unlike the way Mr. Trump and his aides talk about their ever-evolving tariff strategy.
The issue came to the fore on Monday night when Mr. Witkoff began talking about his first encounter with Iran’s foreign minister last Saturday in Oman. The meeting went well, he said, plunging into the complex world of Iran’s nuclear program, which has taken it to the very threshold of building a weapon.
Mr. Witkoff emerged from that meeting envisioning a very different kind of deal with Iran than the one Mr. Waltz described.
In a friendly interview with Fox News, he spoke about building a system of “verification” for the production of enriched uranium, “and ultimately verification on weaponization, that includes missiles, type of missiles that they have stockpiled there, and it includes the trigger for a bomb.” He suggested Iran might still be able to produce uranium at low levels — those needed to produce nuclear power — and he never mentioned the world “dismantlement.”
He was describing, in short, a revised, presumably more Trumpian version of the agreement the Obama administration struck with Iran a decade ago. “In principle the original nuclear deal can be improved,” he said. Mr. Trump has regularly derided that deal as a “disaster” and pulled out of it in 2018, calling it “a horrible one-sided deal that should have never, ever been made.”
A few years later, Iran declared that if the United States would not abide by the old agreement, it would not either. It began enriching uranium to near-bomb-grade, putting it just days or weeks from having the fuel to make six or more weapons. U.S. intelligence agencies concluded that Iranian researchers were working on a “faster and cruder” means of turning that fuel into a weapon.
Mr. Witkoff’s statement didn’t survive for very long. On Tuesday morning, Mr. Trump and his top national security officials, including Mr. Witkoff, were in the Situation Room, debating Iran policy, in a meeting first reported by Axios. By midmorning, Mr. Witkoff posted a message on social media declaring that “Iran must stop and eliminate its nuclear enrichment and weaponization program,” a characterization he never used the previous night.
“A deal with Iran will only be completed if it is a Trump deal,” he said. At a news briefing a few hours later the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, said that Mr. Trump had told the Omani hosts of the Iran talks about “the need for Iran to end its nuclear program through negotiations.” The negotiations resume Saturday.
In fact, Mr. Witkoff and Vice President JD Vance have argued internally that it would doom the negotiations to insist on full dismantlement, according to officials familiar with the ongoing debate, who requested anonymity to discuss private discussions. The Iranians have already declared that they will not give up all of their nuclear program — and thus their option to race for a bomb. Instead, the two have argued the administration should strive for a strict verification system — perhaps run by the United States, rather than the International Atomic Energy Agency — to assure compliance.
But that sounds reminiscent of an Obama-era compromise.
Mr. Waltz and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, officials say, have stuck with their long-held hawkish view that Iran cannot be left with the capability to enrich nuclear fuel. Otherwise, it will be poised to do what it did in recent years: ramp up enrichment to near-bomb-grade levels.
“I think eliminating Iran’s capability is unattainable,” said Gary Samore, who dealt at length with the Iran issue as the top White House nuclear official in the Clinton and Obama administrations. “I don’t think Iran will agree to eliminate the whole program even under the threat of military force.”
The Iranians are hedging their bets. Speaking on Tuesday in Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the country’s supreme leader, told senior government officials that an agreement “may or may not come to fruition; we are neither too optimistic nor too pessimistic.”
He continued: “Of course, we are very pessimistic about the other side.”
Mr. Samore, who now is director of the Crown Center for Middle East Studies at Brandeis University, said he was in favor of any accord that “reset the nuclear clock.”
“All the techniques people have used so far — sabotage, sanctions, diplomacy — have all been about buying time. I don’t think that Trump wants to go to war,” he said, “and the Iranians don’t want to go to war. That suggests there could be room for agreement.”
Farnaz Fassihi contributed reporting from New York.