THE NEW YORK TIMES: US proposes 20-year ban on Iran’s nuclear enrichment, Tehran wants it cut to five

Just before US Vice President JD Vance left Islamabad early Sunday, he described Iran and the United States as worlds apart, chiefly on the question of assurances that Iran can never build a nuclear weapon — “not just now, not just two years from now, but for the long term.”

It turns out that the Trump administration’s idea of the long term is 20 years.

As details of Vance’s 21-hour visit to Pakistan spilled out Monday, people familiar with the negotiations said the US position was not a permanent ban on nuclear enrichment by Iran.

Instead, the United States proposed a 20-year “suspension” of all nuclear activity. That would allow the Iranians to claim they had not permanently given up their right, under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, to produce their own nuclear fuel.

In response, Iran renewed a proposal that it suspend nuclear activity for up to five years, according to two senior Iranian officials and one U.S. official. The Iranians had made a very similar proposal in February during a failed set of negotiations in Geneva that convinced President Donald Trump it was time to go to war. Days later, he ordered the attack on Iran.

There are several other issues looming over the negotiations, including restoring free passage in the Strait of Hormuz and ending Iran’s support for proxy groups like Hamas and Hezbollah.

But Iran’s refusal to end its nuclear ambitions, dismantle its huge atomic infrastructure and ship its stockpile of fuel out of the country has always been the central dispute.

So the revelation that the two sides are now arguing over the time period for suspending nuclear activity suggests that there may well be room for a deal, and there were indications on Monday that negotiators may meet again in the coming days.

White House officials said no meetings had been finalized, but another round of in-person negotiations was being discussed.

But for Trump and his aides there is also the risk that any agreement that emerges may resemble the 2015 nuclear accord, which the president exited three years later and called a “horrible, one-sided deal that should have never, ever been made.”

At the core of Trump’s complaint about the Obama accord, formally called the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, was that it contained “sunsets.” And it did: The Iranians were allowed gradually more enrichment activity until 2030, when all restrictions would evaporate. (Iran’s commitments under the nonproliferation treaty would still ban it from building a bomb.)

But the Obama deal did not involve a full suspension of nuclear activity, which would buy at least a few years of zero nuclear activity — past Trump’s term in office.

The status of the current negotiations was described by officials and experts who declined to speak on the record because of the sensitivity of the talks.

Like the Obama administration, the Trump White House is trying to preserve the secrecy of the negotiating room, so that it has maximum room to cut a deal. And like the Obama administration, it is discovering that both sides engage in strategic leaking.

Vance said Monday evening that there were “some good conversations” with Iran in Pakistan, and the ball is now in Tehran’s court.

“The big question from here on out is whether Iranians will have enough flexibility,” he said on Fox News.

Vance said Iran showed some flexibility but “didn’t move far enousgh.” As to whether there would be additional talks, he said the question would be “best put to the Iranians.”

At the White House, Karoline Leavitt, the press secretary, said that “President Trump, Vice President Vance and the negotiating team have made the U.S. red lines very clear.”

Another sticking point centres on the US demand that Iran remove 440kg of near-bomb-grade uranium from the country, to ensure it could never be diverted to a bomb project. Trump has weighed sending in ground troops to Isfahan to secure the bulk of the highly enriched uranium, which is stored deep underground in what look like large scuba-diving tanks.

The Iranians have insisted the fuel must stay inside Iran. But they have offered, as they did in Geneva, to dilute it significantly so that it could not be used to produce a nuclear weapon.

That, too, would extend the timeline to a bomb. The risk, of course, is that the Iranians would still have possession of the fuel and in the future might be able to re-enrich it to its current state of about 60 per cent purity, just below the 90 per cent needed to make a weapon.

As the talks move to their next stage, one thing to watch is whether Iran gets back money it believes it was owed.

Trump has complained for years, and repeated in recent weeks, that the Obama administration released “planeloads” of cash to Iran — a reference to returning $US1.4 billion in Iranian assets long frozen by the United States, plus $300 million in accumulated interest. (Some of it did go in pallets of cash aboard an airplane, because Western banks were prohibited from doing business with Iranian entities.)

It is too early to know how it will turn out, but part of the negotiations underway now involve Iran’s demand that the West unfreeze roughly $US6 billion in funds from oil sales, which have been tied up in Qatar because of sanctions that date to Trump’s first term.