If there is one thing every U.S. president, regardless of political party, says on foreign policy, it is this: Under no circumstances will the United States allow Iran to obtain a nuclear weapon.
Former Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, as well as President Joe Biden and President-elect Donald Trump, are four very different leaders. However, all of them sang from the same song-sheet when it came to the Iranian nuclear matter.
Unfortunately, Trump will enter office on Jan. 20, 2025, with Iran as close to nuclear-grade bomb fuel as it has ever been. The Iranian government is first and foremost responsible for this development. However, make no mistake: Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Obama-era Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action in favor of a campaign of maximum pressure against Tehran is where the story fell off the rails.
Far from buckling under U.S. economic sanctions and crawling back to the negotiating table, Iran upped the ante by engaging in maximum resistance — installing and using more advanced centrifuges, limiting international monitors from accessing certain parts of its nuclear apparatus, producing higher-grade uranium, and increasing its overall stockpile. Outside of an informal arrangement with Tehran that collapsed after Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attack on Israel, the Biden administration didn’t have much luck in stopping Iran’s nuclear progress.
Today, the Iranians are rapidly boosting the production of 60% highly enriched uranium, a short step away from bomb-grade fuel, in two underground nuclear facilities that are extremely difficult, if not impossible, to destroy from the air. The question, then, is obvious: How will Trump manage this matter to ensure it doesn’t turn into a crisis? There are three tracks available.
First, Trump could opt for another bite at the maximum pressure apple. Proponents of the first maximum pressure campaign have argued that this approach failed not because it was ill-conceived but because time simply ran out after Biden took the oath in January 2021 (never mind the fact that Biden largely kept most of those sanctions in place). Maximum pressure 2.0 would pick up where Trump left off four years earlier by penalizing the Chinese companies that import Iranian oil, slapping more sanctions on Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard carve-outs, and deploying more U.S. military forces to the Middle East to coerce the Iranian government into re-reentering a negotiation. In essence, Trump would be betting all of his chips on the stick.
Second, Trump could levy the military hammer. Folks such as John Bolton have been pushing for Washington to bomb Iranian nuclear facilities for the last decade and a half, but this course of action has arguably gotten more tempting over the last year. Iran, for instance, can no longer rely as much on its regional proxies. Hezbollah in Lebanon is licking its wounds from a monthslong Israeli military offensive, Hamas is still getting bombarded by the Israel Defense Forces, and Bashar Assad is no longer ruling Syria.
Even so, a U.S. military operation is hardly a cost-free option. There are still about 2,500 U.S. troops in Iraq who would be prime targets for Iranian-backed retaliation. The large U.S. bases in the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, and Kuwait, not to mention the U.S. warships in the Persian Gulf, might not be off limits either. Just as troubling, far from eliminating the program, a U.S. strike would be more likely to push Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei into green-lighting a dash for a nuclear bomb — a decision the U.S. intelligence community assessed hasn’t yet been made.
Third and finally, Trump could follow a strategy of pressure and negotiation. This would be in keeping with Trump’s deal-making instincts. It would involve keeping U.S. sanctions on the Iranian economy in place but preserving a diplomatic route the Iranians could use as an exit ramp. However, this strategy only works if Trump is realistic about what he can achieve. Demanding that Iran cease all uranium enrichment or shut down its entire nuclear infrastructure, for example, is totally unreasonable from Tehran’s perspective and would kill a negotiation before it even starts.
Capping Iran’s enrichment to 60%, rolling back the stockpile Tehran currently possesses to an agreed-upon level, and reinstituting an international monitoring regime over Iran’s entire program, root-to-branch, is more likely to succeed. Not to be overstated, such a deal would minimize the prospects of the United States engaging in another war in the region, a scenario that would kill Trump’s professed goal of pulling the country out of endless conflicts.
Let’s be straight: any deal Trump strikes with Iran (if he can strike one, to begin with) is going to be less comprehensive than Obama’s imperfect JCPOA. Courtesy of their nuclear advances, the Iranians have spent the last five years gobbling up more leverage to play with. Assuming Trump can return Washington and Tehran to the pre-2018 status quo, he will probably need to offer Tehran more concessions to get there.
Anything, however, is better than a war the U.S. has no interest in fighting.
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Daniel DePetris (@DanDePetris) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. His opinions are his own.