Israel’s prime minister tied his country’s fate to Donald Trump. Now America is talking to its enemy
AT LEAST Binyamin Netanyahu wore a suit. The Israeli prime minister had a few goals when he met Donald Trump at the White House on April 7th. He needed relief from a newly imposed 17% tariff on Israeli goods. He hoped to convince Mr Trump that Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Turkish president, was meddling dangerously in Syria. And he wanted to explain that the time was right to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities: diplomacy would be futile.
The meeting did not go as he had planned. It was not as bad as the humiliation of Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s president, in February. But it was not much better. The tariffs stayed put. Mr Trump praised Mr Erdogan as a friend. And he announced that America would start “direct” talks with Iran on April 12th. “Trump gave Netanyahu a red line: don’t do anything and mess this up,” says an Israeli source.
srael has been feeling bullish. It retaliated against Iran’s missile strike in October by destroying most of its air-defence network. “Iran is at its most vulnerable,” says an Israeli security official. He notes that in the past Mr Netanyahu hesitated to give the order to strike Iran’s nuclear sites, but now he has less reason to hold back—apart from Mr Trump. The prime minister has defied other presidents publicly, while gaining popularity at home, but it is much harder for him to say no to Mr Trump. He has “shackled Israel’s foreign policy to him”, says an Israeli diplomat.
The negotiations between America and Iran will begin in Oman. Abbas Araghchi, the Iranian foreign minister, will represent Iran, while Steve Witkoff, Mr Trump’s Middle East envoy, is expected to lead the American delegation. The format remains unclear. So far Iran has refused direct negotiations. Mr Araghchi said messages would be passed through the Omanis.
The talks could not be more urgent. In 2015 Iran and seven world powers signed the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). It curbed Iran’s nuclear work in return for sanctions relief. Since Mr Trump abandoned the deal in 2018, however, Iran’s uranium enrichment has reached unprecedented levels. The UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency said in February that Iran had enriched 275kg of uranium to 60% purity, close to weapons-grade.
That would be enough to produce six nuclear bombs if refined further. Iran’s “breakout time”, the period it would need to enrich a bomb’s worth of uranium, is now a matter of days or at best weeks. Without a deal, it seems probable that America or Israel (or both) will decide to bomb Iran’s nuclear sites later this year.
Yet it is far from clear what sort of deal both sides want. Start with America. Mike Waltz, the national security adviser, favours an agreement that dismantles Iran’s nuclear facilities. Mr Netanyahu concurs: he called for a deal “the way that it was done in Libya”, which agreed in 2003 to break up its fledgling nuclear programme.
His choice of words will have alarmed the Iranians. Muammar Qaddafi, the Libyan dictator, was overthrown and killed eight years later. Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, is keen for his regime to avoid a similar fate. He views the nuclear programme as an insurance policy. The ayatollah may be willing to mothball Iran’s centrifuges, but not to destroy them.
Fortunately for him, Trumpworld contains multitudes. In an interview with Tucker Carlson, an influential pro-Trump podcaster, Mr Witkoff said his aim was a “verification programme so that nobody worries about weaponisation”. That seems a more realistic goal. It also seems to have the president’s support—and that of isolationist Republicans. “Anyone advocating for conflict with Iran is not an ally of the United States, but an enemy,” Mr Carlson wrote on X, a social-media platform.
Even a modest deal would require America to make concessions as well. Mr Trump’s advisers have offered few clues on this. They would certainly lift sanctions on Iranian oil, allowing it to sell crude on the open market rather than at a discount through shadowy intermediaries.
Iran will also want guarantees that a new deal would be more durable than the old one. They hope it would be a Senate-ratified treaty; but it is unclear if Mr Trump can find 67 votes for that. “It really depends on what the deal looks like, and whether you can get normalisation between Israel and Saudi Arabia at the same time,” says one Republican senator.
Time is short. Asked how long they think Mr Trump would be willing to negotiate, several American, Israeli and Arab sources gave the same answer: a few months. The JCPOA took two years.
Another factor limiting the time for talks is the American military build-up already under way in the region. It is meant to show Iran that the threat of a strike is real. But it cannot be maintained for long. Drawing it down prematurely could suggest a lack of determination to the Iranians and encourage the Israelis to go it alone.
Regional officials draw a parallel with Mr Witkoff’s talks with Russia. When they began in February, Mr Trump seemed optimistic he could bring the war in Ukraine to a swift end. Today the process is bogged down: Vladimir Putin, unsurprisingly, turned out to be a tough negotiator.
The risk is of something similar with Iran. Whenever a deal seems close, it adds more demands. A hasty deal will probably be a shoddy one—what a former American ambassador to Israel calls a “JCPOA-lite”. Mr Netanyahu may hope he still has enough allies in Washington to spike such an agreement. This week’s meeting with Mr Trump may have been disappointing. If America’s talks with Iran flounder, though, the next may be more to his liking.
Source: Economist
