Iran indicated Tuesday that it would be willing to accept temporary limits on uranium enrichment as part of a nuclear deal with the U.S. — accepting the same terms that were in President Barack Obama’s deal in 2015.
The Trump administration is insisting, at least publicly, on the dismantling of Iran’s enrichment program.
The Times of Israel reported:
Iran is open to accepting temporary limits on its uranium enrichment, its deputy foreign minister said Tuesday, while adding that talks with the United States have yet to address such specifics.
Tehran and Washington held their fourth round of nuclear talks on Sunday — their highest-level contact since the United States pulled out of the 2015 nuclear deal in 2018 during Donald Trump’s first term as US president.
“For a limited period of time, we can accept a series of restrictions on the level and volume of enrichment,” said Deputy Foreign Minister Majid Takht-Ravanchi.
There is no civilian purpose for higher levels of uranium enrichment; it is solely for use in nuclear weapons.
President Trump has frequently cited his May 2018 decision to leave Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran as one of the most significant decisions of his first presidency.
In his 2018 speech about leaving the Iran deal, Trump said:
The deal lifted crippling economic sanctions on Iran in exchange for very weak limits on the regime’s nuclear activity — and no limits at all on its other malign behavior, including its sinister activities in Syria, Yemen, and other places all around the world.
In other words, at the point when the United States had maximum leverage, this disastrous deal gave this regime — and it’s a regime of great terror — many billions of dollars, some of it in actual cash — a great embarrassment to me as a citizen and to all citizens of the United States.
A constructive deal could easily have been struck at the time, but it wasn’t.
At the heart of the Iran deal was a giant fiction: that a murderous regime desired only a peaceful nuclear energy program.
News reports have suggested, however, that the ongoing talks between the Trump administration and the Iranian regime are producing the framework of an agreement that repeats many of the Obama deal’s flaws.
Special Envoy Steve Witkoff told Breitbart News last week that the U.S. would insist that Iran’s nuclear enrichment facilities would have to be “dismantled.” However, he did not say Iran would have to stop supporting terror, or show improvement on human rights.
Trump said Tuesday in Saudi Arabia that Iran “will never have a nuclear weapon” — guarantees similar to those of the Obama and Biden administrations.
President Trump has said that he would attack Iran if the regime refuses to reach a nuclear deal with the U.S.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of Trump 2.0: The Most Dramatic ‘First 100 Days’ in Presidential History, available for Amazon Kindle. He is also the author of The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency, now available on Audible. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
