Cnn
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Iran and the United States are starting talks with high issues to conclude a new nuclear agreement on Saturday foreshadowing by the threat of President Trump of military strikes due to the failure and the warning of Tehran any attack on this subject would lead to the United States in a broader conflict in the Middle East.
Reunion, which will be held in the Arab Nation of the Gulf of Oman, could be the first direct talks between Iranian and American officials in a decade, although Iran insists that they will be indirect – with mediators acting like Go -Betweens for the two nations.
President Donald Trump gave Iran a deadline for two months to accept an agreement that would lead Iran to reduce its nuclear footprint or completely eliminate its program.
“I want them not to have a nuclear weapon. I want Iran to be a wonderful, large and happy country, but they cannot have a nuclear weapon,” said Trump on board the Air Force towards Florida on Friday evening.
The talks occur after the Islamic Republic has seen its regional projection considerably weakened in the last 18 months by Israeli strikes on its attorney, the overthrow of Bashar al-Assad in Syria and unprecedented attacks within its own borders.
The issues on Saturday are raised: Trump said that military strikes were possible against Iran if a new nuclear agreement was not concluded, although he said that Israel – who pleaded for an attack on Iran – would take the lead.
“If it requires soldiers, we are going to have soldiers,” Trump said on Wednesday. “Israel will obviously be very involved in this. They will be the leader of this. ”
But Iran has repeatedly refused to negotiate under stress. On Friday, he presented his “red lines” for talks, including the “threatening” language, the “excessive requirements” concerning the Iranian nuclear program and the Iranian defense industry, according to the semi-state news agency Tasnim, probably referring to the threat of Tehran’s security.
The arrival in Oman this weekend of the Trump administration sent from the Middle East, Steve Witkoff, for interviews with Iranian officials, will add another file to the range of complex and insoluble problems in its expanding wallet and will follow a face-to-face meeting on Friday with the Russian president Vladimir Putin on Ukraine in St Petersburg.
Earlier Friday, the White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said during a press briefing: “These will be direct talks with the Iranians, and I want to specify.” She added that Trump’s ultimate goal is to “make sure Iran can never get a nuclear weapon.”
Although the specific agenda of talks is not clear, the president undertook to obtain a “stronger” agreement that the 2015 nuclear agreement negotiated by the Obama administration, which aimed to limit the nuclear program of Iran. Trump withdrew from the agreement in 2018, appealing to it a “disastrous” agreement which gave money to a regime that sponsored terrorism.
Trump wants to conclude an agreement that will prevent Iran from building a nuclear weapon, but did not specify how it would be different from the previous agreement, known as the Complete Complete Action Plan, or the JCPOA. This agreement aimed to limit Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for the lifting of Western sanctions.
US officials have suggested that they could push Iran to fully dismantle its nuclear program, including its civil energy component, which Tehran is entitled to a United Nations nuclear treaty.
However, Iranian officials rejected this proposal as a non-beginner, accusing the United States of using it as a pretext to weaken and finally overthrow the Islamic Republic.
Experts say that Tehran considers its nuclear program as its greatest source of lever and abandonment that would leave the country dangerously exposed.
But the administration also claims that it does not only seek a possible nuclear agreement: it also wants to engage Iran on a wide range of questions, said a senior administration official.
The meeting on Saturday will test if Iran is willing to have high -level discussions, which could lead to negotiations on Iran’s nuclear program, the ballistic missile program and support for proxies in the region, said the manager.
“Iran would be impatient to come back in something like JCPOA, so the question is: are they ready to put something else on the table?” The manager said.
While Trump threatens the prospect of the war accordingly for failed talks, other American officials have taken a much less bellicose tone.
Witkoff stressed at the end of last month that a diplomatic solution was at hand. In an interview with Tucker Carlson, he praised the American military force and exposed the vulnerabilities of Iran, but was quick to clarify: “It is not a threat.”
“If the Iranians never listen to this program, it was not I who put a threat. It is the president who has this authority,” he said.
A former American official said that talks could be a starting point for both parties to determine if other negotiations were even possible.
“At best Saturday is a table exercise, to determine if an agreement is even possible,” said a former American official who has negotiated with Iran on nuclear issues.
“I suspect that Iran will claim to demonstrate flexibility because the devil is in the details of nuclear talks, and it is unlikely that the details will be discussed in this opening episode,” said the former official.
For the moment, this is not a negotiation, the spokesperson for the State Department, Tammy Bruce, warned, but a meeting with a specific objective.
“The very specific thing that must be accomplished, which would make people a much safer place, is to ensure that Iran never gets a nuclear weapon,” Bruce told journalists.
The supreme chief of Iran said by a recent letter to Trump an opening to talks that could lead Iran to accept measures that would prevent him from building a nuclear weapon.
But the process of planning talks with high issues on Saturday was bumpy.
Sometimes, this week, there were questions among the people involved as if they were even going to occur, since Iran said that they would indirectly engage that Trump insisted that there would be a direct meeting. But Friday, it appeared that the talks were on the right track to move forward, from the sources familiar to the planning said.
In an article in the Washington Post this week, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Abbas Araghchi, warned that a war against Iran would lead to the United States-and the region-in an expensive conflict that a president elected on an anti-war platform would be eager to avoid.
“We cannot imagine President Trump who wanted to become another American president mired in a catastrophic war in the Middle East-a conflict that would extend quickly in the region and exponentially cost the billions of dollars of taxpayers that his predecessors burned in Afghanistan and Iraq,” he wrote.
Trump administration officials credited Israel’s actions for the position in which Iran is, with Witkoff claiming that the strikes of Israel have left the defenses of Iran “eviscerated”.
But despite the united front with Israel that US administration officials presented Trump’s announcement this week on Saturday’s talks seemed to be a surprise for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who was sitting next to him. Two Israeli sources told CNN that the announcement was “certainly not” to Israel.
Upon his return, Netanyahu said that if the nuclear talks come on, it can still strike Iran.
CNN previously reported that US intelligence agencies had warned Biden and Trump administrations that Israel seems likely to strike objectives associated with the Iranian nuclear program as part of this country’s mission to promulgate a change of regime in the Islamic Republic.
Michael Williams of CNN, Alayna Treene, Alireza Hajihosseini, Pauline Lockwood and Nadeen Ebrahim contributed to this report.
