A brief handshake may be the most likely outcome from preliminary diplomatic talks set for Saturday between American and Iranian officials.
It would probably be enough to keep the discussions going, and potentially lead to the first official face-to-face negotiations between the two countries since President Trump abandoned a landmark nuclear accord seven years ago.
The talks, scheduled to be held in Oman, will serve as a feeling-out session to see whether the Trump administration and Iran’s clerical government could move to full negotiations to limit Iran’s nuclear program.
Both sides come in with high distrust, given that Mr. Trump walked away from the 2015 accord that Iran had brokered with the United States and other world powers, and slapped harsh sanctions on Tehran during his first term.
Mr. Trump now wants to strike a deal — both to showcase his negotiating skills and to keep simmering tensions between Iran and Israel from escalating into a more intense conflict that would further roil the Middle East. Iranian officials are skeptical but “ready to engage in earnest and with a view to seal a deal,” Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi wrote in The Washington Post this week.
The goals of Saturday’s meeting are modest, reflecting the gap between the two sides: to agree on a framework for negotiations and a timeline. It is not clear whether the envoys will speak directly, as Mr. Trump has insisted, or pass messages through Omani intermediaries shuttling between rooms, as Mr. Araghchi has indicated.
The Iranian delegation plans to convey that it is open to talking about reductions to its enrichment and allowing outside monitoring, according to two senior Iranian officials who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive matter. But, they said, the negotiators are uninterested in discussing dismantlement of the nuclear program, which Trump administration officials have insisted on.
Experts predict that a handshake or another brief encounter would be a way to satisfy both sides and send a gesture of good will without direct negotiations.
Mr. Trump said he would rely on instinct as to whether Saturday’s talks, expected to be held at a seaside compound, could blossom into further negotiations. “When you start talks, you know if they’re going along well or not,” he said this week. “And I would say the conclusion would be when I think they’re not going along well. And that’s just a feeling.”
What’s at stake?
At issue is the dwindling power of the original nuclear deal — which European leaders have kept limping along since 2018, when Mr. Trump withdrew the United States — before its most punishing restrictions expire in October.
Known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action and completed under President Barack Obama, the accord was the result of years of painstaking, technical negotiations that agreed to lift international sanctions against Iran in exchange for limits on its nuclear program.
Only nine countries in the world have nuclear weapons, and adding Iran to the list could pose an existential threat to its main adversary, Israel, and possibly other nations. Experts also have raised concerns that Iran could share its nuclear capabilities, potentially with terrorist groups.
Iran has long maintained its nuclear activities are legal and meant only for civilian purposes, like energy and medicine, and not for weapons. But it has enriched uranium, the key ingredient for a nuclear bomb, beyond the levels necessary for civilian use.
In the years since Mr. Trump withdrew from the accord, Iran has steadily accelerated uranium enrichment to the point where some experts estimate it could soon build a nuclear weapon. Its economy has crumbled under American sanctions, and Mr. Trump just this week imposed new measures targeting Iran’s oil trade.
Israel’s government believes Tehran will expand its nuclear program and is pushing to destroy it.
“The deal with Iran is acceptable only if the nuclear sites are destroyed under U.S. supervision,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel said this week. “Otherwise, the military option is the only choice.”
While Mr. Araghchi was closely involved in the earlier negotiations, the expected American envoy, Steve Witkoff, has little experience in the technical aspects of Iran’s program. He was set to arrive in Oman after a visit Friday to St. Petersburg for talks with President Vladimir V. Putin about a potential cease-fire between Russia and Ukraine.
Iran will all but certainly extend diplomatic talks for as long as possible — both to delay any Israeli military action and to push past an Oct. 18 deadline when the United Nations’ authority to impose quick “snapback” sanctions expires.
“They have an opportunity to tie Israel and the United States in knots by getting into negotiations in which they dupe Witkoff into thinking that negotiations will produce a lot,” said Elliott Abrams, who served as Mr. Trump’s Iran envoy during his first term. “And so the negotiations start, which holds Israel off, and they continue, and they continue.”
A new deal, he said, “could be reached pretty quickly” — but Iran would most likely commit to little more than what it agreed to in the 2015 accord. Such an outcome would irritate Israel.
It also might not be enough for Mr. Trump, who previously demanded more limits both on Iran’s missiles and its Shiite proxy forces in Iraq, Lebanon and Yemen, to claim he struck a better deal than his Democratic predecessors.
Diplomacy or conflict?
Mr. Abrams predicted Israel would eventually strike Iran anyway. Since at least last fall, Israel has been preparing highly precise long-range missiles, including ones that can hit underground targets, for an airstrike on Iran.
The Trump administration also has deployed an extraordinary military buildup in range, including two aircraft carriers, additional B-2 stealth bombers and fighter jets, as well as air defenses.
Yet Mr. Trump keenly wants to avoid a new war in the region, which his advisers have warned would siphon military resources away from other potential threats, like China, and detract from his efforts to be a president of peace.
“The president really doesn’t want to use the military here,” said Dana Stroul, who was the Pentagon’s top official for Middle East policy during the Biden administration.
Similar to how other recent presidents dealt with Iran, she said, Mr. Trump appears to have considered “what a military campaign would look like, and what it could actually accomplish, and opt to try the diplomatic track first.”
She noted that Mr. Trump is planning to visit Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates as soon as next month. “What he is hearing from all Arab leaders he’s talking to is that they do not want more war,” she said.
Mr. Trump has said he is prepared for the worst. “If it requires military, we’re going to have military,” he said on Wednesday, adding that Israel would “obviously be the leader of that.”
Iran is also steeling itself. “Mark my words: Iran prefers diplomacy, but it knows how to defend itself,” Mr. Araghchi wrote. “We seek peace, but will never accept submission.”
Farnaz Fassihi contributed reporting.
