Although US President Donald Trump suggested last week that a nuclear deal with Iran was “close,” that doesn’t actually seem to be the case as both sides are digging in on their respective red lines and appearing to rule out the early possibility of a negotiated solution to the future of Iran’s nuclear programme.
On 20 May, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei called US demands for Iran to cease even low levels of uranium enrichment “excessive and outrageous” and “nonsense,” and he cast further doubt on the expected next round of indirect talks between the two sides yielding any result. Other Iranian leaders have also reiterated that talks will fail if the United States maintains its demand that Iran cease domestic uranium enrichment, a right Tehran believes it has under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). Iran said it’s continuing to study the latest proposal made by the United States during the most recent round of talks.
But such demands, which reflect the view that uranium enrichment facilities are the key to Iran’s ability to turn innocuous materials into a nuclear weapon, have become the bedrock of the Trump administration’s position. US special envoy Steve Witkoff said that the United States would not allow Iran to have even “1%” of enrichment capacity. Secretary of State and acting National Security Advisor Marco Rubio told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on 20 May that the administration is opposed to any domestic enrichment capability in Iran because it is relatively easy to go from churning out low-grade uranium to weapons-grade uranium.
“It is our view that they want enrichment as a deterrent,” Rubio said.
Rubio on Iran’s enrichment:
"Once you know how to enrich at any level, all you need is time to be able to enrich at a higher level. And they've already proven the ability to enrich at a higher level. In fact, they have and are doing so now," US Secretary of State Marco Rubio... pic.twitter.com/8yEV8Eht2R
— Open Source Intel (@Osint613) May 21, 2025
Trump has previously warned Iran that if it does not make a deal, it could face a military strike with “violence like people haven’t seen before.”
“We are nowhere close to a deal right now,” said Ali Vaez, the Iran Project director at the International Crisis Group. “From what I understand, the US proposal is zero enrichment, which has a 20-year unblemished track record of failure.”
The five rounds of talks so far seemed to offer the best chance in years to diplomatically resolve the impasse between Iran and the United States over Tehran’s growing nuclear capabilities. On 23 May, the respective delegations met in Rome for the second time, and Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, said the talks were ‘one of the most professional rounds of negotiations’ yet.
“The fifth round of Iran-US talks has concluded today in Rome with some, but not conclusive, progress,” said Omani mediator Badr al-Busaidi after Friday’s meeting at the Omani embassy in Rome’s Camilluccia neighbourhood.
Iran’s economy has been battered by US and Western sanctions, as well as continued restrictions on its ability to export oil, including intensified US efforts to crack down on illicit tankers that ship Iranian crude. Iran’s regional proxies, including militant groups in Lebanon and the Gaza Strip, have been decimated, and its hold over Syria has weakened.
That, coupled with apparently popular Iranian support for diplomatic engagement with Washington, has given Iranian leaders the political space to engage again in talks—but not at any price and especially not renouncing what the country sees as its right to enrich uranium at least to the low levels used in civilian nuclear reactors.
But the Trump administration has its own domestic politics to consider in talks with Iran, particularly when it comes to ceding any ground on the fight over enrichment. On 14 May, more than 200 lawmakers in both chambers of Congress sent Trump a letter urging him against any deal that would allow Iran to retain uranium enrichment capability, which the lawmakers saw as the fatal flaw of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) that the Obama administration inked with Tehran in 2015.
That letter, and the congressional pressure, “allows Trump to benefit from a ‘bad cop’ in the Iranian nuclear talks,” said Behnam Ben Taleblu, senior director of the Iran programme at the Foundation for Defence of Democracies. He said that an entrenched position could ultimately make it possible to wrest concessions from Iran, because without them, Congress would be unlikely to ratify any future US-Iran agreement as a treaty. Doing so is important for Iran, as the JCPOA’s lack of ratification was a perennial source of insecurity for Tehran.
Trump’s recent comments that a deal was close came in the wake of Iranian statements that Tehran would be willing to forswear nuclear weapons and end high-grade enrichment of uranium in exchange for sanctions relief, which was also a primary driver of Iran’s acquiescence to the JCPOA.
There remain all sorts of questions as to whether sanctions relief would ever actually materialise in the event a deal were reached. US primary and secondary sanctions, such as those restricting Iran’s energy and banking sectors, are notoriously sticky. As Iran learned between 2015 and 2018, it has proven difficult to entice US banks and businesses, and even many European ones, to go back to doing business as usual in places that have long been blacklisted and might again be soon.
