Steve Witkoff, President Trump’s chief Iran negotiator, offered the clearest outlines of the administration’s position in talks over Tehran’s nuclear program.
President Trump’s chief Iran negotiator said on Sunday that Tehran must give up all enrichment of nuclear fuel in any deal over the fate of the country’s nuclear program, a demand that was swiftly rejected by his Iranian counterpart in the talks.
Mr. Trump’s envoy, Steve Witkoff, told ABC’s “This Week” that enrichment was “one very, very clear red line” for the administration, the most direct statement yet from the White House that it would not permit Iran the capability to produce enriched uranium, even for the nuclear power plants it says it wants to build.
“We cannot have that because enrichment enables weaponization, and we will not allow a bomb to get here,” Mr. Witkoff said.
Within a few hours, Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, dismissed Mr. Witkoff’s demand, accusing him of trying to negotiate the deal in public and repeating Iran’s long-running argument that it will never give up its right to enrichment under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. Iran is a signatory to the 1970 treaty, though the U.S. and Israel contend it has manipulated its provisions to become a “threshold” nuclear state, enriching fuel to just below the purity needed to produce a nuclear weapon.
“If the U.S. is interested in ensuring that Iran will not have nuclear weapons, a deal is within reach,” Mr. Araghchi wrote in a social media post. He added, “Enrichment in Iran, however, will continue with or without a deal.”
Members of the administration, including Mr. Trump himself, have for weeks been vague about whether they would agree to a deal in which Iran would be permitted any capability to produce enriched uranium — even for ostensibly commercial purposes. In 2018, when Mr. Trump pulled out of the Obama administration’s 2015 nuclear deal with Iran, he argued that the previous administration had created what he called a “disaster” by allowing Iran to retain modest enrichment capabilities. Iran subsequently ramped up its operations to produce fuel that is near weapons grade.