Talks between the US and Iran are expected to resume soon as a fragile ceasefire holds, but American officials involved in previous nuclear deal negotiations with Tehran have some advice for President Donald Trump's administration.
The first is that US officials need to understand how to deal with Iran, before they can get a new agreement over the line. Former US diplomat Alan Eyre, who helped to negotiate the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), said resolving the nuclear dispute remained “eminently doable” but would require “serious and sustained negotiation”.
Whether the Trump administration is prepared to make that kind of commitment is an open question, he said.
The 2015 nuclear deal between Iran and world powers was signed during former president Barack Obama's administration. It placed limits on Tehran's nuclear programme in exchange for sanctions relief.
National Security Council
Mr Trump was elected in 2016 and withdrew from the agreement two years later, arguing that the deal did not address Iran's regional proxies that were waging war in Syria, Yemen and Iraq at the time, and its ballistic missiles programme, which was also a threat to Gulf allies. He instead pursued a policy of "maximum pressure" which saw intensified sanctions on Iran in order to force it to renegotiate the JCPOA. His successor, Joe Biden, tried to re-enter the deal, but those stop-and-start efforts were cut short when Mr Trump returned to office last year.
Mr Trump bombed Iran in June last year in an attempt to take out the country's nuclear industry, and launched further strikes at the end of February. Iran's leadership and military-linked sites, as well as remaining nuclear centres, were the targets of attacks by the US and Israel.
Mr Eyre said the conflict and the previous closure of the Strait of Hormuz has already caused “massive economic damage” to Iran and other countries. He described the war as “incredibly destructive” with no clear winners and said Iran, already under severe economic strain, was likely to face worsening conditions.
“The Iranian people were immiserated before this. No one’s going to win this war but, whenever it ends, most Iranians’ lives will be a lot harder,” Mr Eyre added.
He said the Iranian leadership was now focused on regime survival rather than outright victory, while Israel appeared intent on weakening Iran to the point of collapse. He said the real question was, "can the United States sustain the institutional focus needed to negotiate with Iran?”
Building a deal
The current situation is vastly different to how things were leading up to the 2015 nuclear deal.
Richard Nephew, who was involved in negotiating the JCPOA and was US deputy special envoy for Iran, said that, unlike the latest talks, which took place after a conflict and a ceasefire, it took 10 years to get to the previous nuclear discussions.
"We had been engaged in an on-again, off-again process with the Iranians through our European partners and allies primarily and then the P5+1 [China, France, Russia, the UK and US]," he told The National. "But the actual process that led to the back-channel talks started in 2011-2012, with communications passed via Oman and then meetings in Oman and then eventually into the P5+1 process."
Mr Nephew, now a senior researcher at Columbia University, first became involved in the indirect process in 2004 and attended back-channel meetings in 2013. He was also involved when Mr Biden tried to revive the deal in 2021.
"We were back to passing notes back and forth, though not across a hallway, over the course of a few days in Vienna," Mr Nephew explained.
He said the mood in the lead-up to the initial JCPOA negotiations was a mix of scepticism and optimism. "I was pretty convinced from late September 2013 that we were going to get a deal, including the JCPOA. Others were far more sceptical," he said. "But that is because there was a common sense of purpose with the Iranians, a willingness to get things done, a sense that the risk of escalation was serious, those sorts of things that contributed to a serious but positive effort."
Former British minister for the Middle East Alistair Burt recalled his first conversations with Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi in 2017, talks that focused on the UK’s continued support for the nuclear deal after US threats to withdraw.
“I always worked on the basis that, in getting to understand another state, you didn't have to agree with their stance,” Mr Burt said. "You didn't have to seek to justify or excuse their stances, but you did need to understand where another state came from."
The pair met again in Brussels, Paris and New York. “Over time I got to know him,” Mr Burt said. "Our conversations were always entirely correct. I found him a good interlocutor, thoughtful and straightforward in his answers to me.
“I never disguised the UK's concern about regional proxy activity and the like, but we tried to find a basis of trust and I think that has been, of course … hugely weakened by events."
Another exchange was with Iran's former foreign minister Javad Zarif at the UN, in the presence of US, EU, Russian and Chinese ministers. At the time, attempts were made to persuade the first Trump administration to halt plans to withdraw from the nuclear deal.
Former US secretary of state Rex Tillerson raised the issue of Iran’s ballistic missiles programme and regional proxies, which were causing havoc in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Yemen at the time.
“Zarif said: ‘You know, Mr Secretary of State, if you would have wanted to include everything in the deal, there wouldn't have been a deal. We wouldn't have signed a deal comprising everything, and we did the deal on what we could’,” Mr Burt recalled.
'Cardinal mistake'
He agreed that Iran’s regional threat, beyond its nuclear capabilities, was a “weak point” in the original agreement – but said a deal to contain Iran’s nuclear ambitions was crucial.
Mr Eyre said Iran had turned to a “riskier but more potent” form of economic strategy by exerting control over the strait. “It doesn’t have a military that can defend Iran against the United States and Israel, so it has to choose an asymmetric response,” he said.
Iran and the US announced early on Friday that the strait had been reopened, following a ceasefire in Lebanon.
Mr Burt urged caution ahead of further talks, despite this major jurdle being overcome, and warned the US administration against committing a "cardinal mistake” by failing to “understand Iran at all”.
Vice President JD Vance led the US team at the latest negotiations in Islamabad. While Mr Nephew acknowledged that holding direct talks are "far superior" in such negotiations, he was uncertain whether the presence of Mr Vance at the table would do much.
"Vance does not speak on behalf of the President, really, and is not seen as being terribly credible either," he said. "His main virtue, I think, is that he's seen as anti-war."
Mr Vance's main brief is to "give Trump a win", Mr Burt said. "That's the only thing that the Americans will sign up to. If he's wise, he will find that in a negotiation around elements of the nuclear deal,” he added.
