Urging Iran to ‘make the big deal,’ Trump ties nuclear negotiations to election

President Donald Trump on Friday celebrated the return of an American imprisoned in Iran by urging Tehran to “make the Big deal” on its nuclear program, and dangled the possibility that they would get better terms if they negotiated before the presidential election, seeming to invite Tehran to help return him to office.

Trump’s offer was immediately rejected by the Iranian leadership, which now seems to harbour doubts that he will remain president, and is hunkering down to survive US-led sanctions until they see the results of the November election.

At the same time, hints from inside the International Atomic Energy Agency suggested that a forthcoming report on Iran’s nuclear progress could say that Tehran has boosted its stockpile of low-enriched uranium by about 50% in the past three months, and now possesses about eight times as much nuclear fuel as was permitted under the nuclear accord that Trump abandoned two years ago.

Ever since Trump chose to leave what he called a “terrible” and “failed” deal, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and others have said that the combination of escalating sanctions, diplomatic isolation and the threat of possible military force would prompt the Iranian government to come to the negotiating table. So far that has failed, and Trump’s offer Friday was a remarkably transparent invitation to an adversary to give him a diplomatic win before what could be a close US election.

“Thank you to Iran,” the president wrote in a tweet about the release of a Navy veteran detained in Tehran, Michael R White. “Don’t wait until after US Election to make the Big deal. I’m going to win. You’ll make a better deal now!”

Aides to Pompeo and Trump declined to explain why, if the US was negotiating in its own national interest, Iran might get preferential treatment for negotiating with Trump before the election.

“That is probably something best directed to the White House,’’ said Brian H. Hook, the State Department’s special envoy for Iran, who would have to negotiate any agreement should the leadership in Tehran decide to come to the table.

“We had a deal when you entered office,” Iran’s foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, responded to Trump in a tweet Friday. Iran and the other participants in the 2015 agreement — Britain, France, Germany, the European Union, Russia and China — “never left the table,” he said. “Your advisers — most fired by now — made a dumb bet. Up to you to decide *when* you want to fix it.”

Hesameddin Ashena, the top policy adviser to President Hassan Rouhani of Iran, also responded. “You are going down on November 3rd and we know that,” he tweeted. “So you’ll need to offer much more than Obama did!”

That aggressive tone marked a change. In recent months, Iran has seemed interested in turning down the temperature with Washington, negotiating on the release of prisoners and reducing attacks from its proxy militias on US forces in Iraq. But the calculus may have changed now that polls show Trump struggling; the presumptive Democratic candidate, Joe Biden, was involved in the negotiation of the 2015 deal and the Iranians may have concluded it can be reconstructed if he takes office.

“I think something has certainly changed on the Iranian side,” said Henry Rome, an Iran analyst at the Eurasia Group, a political risk consulting firm. “Certainly last summer, they assumed Trump was going to be reelected.”

Rome said he would draw two conclusions. “You don’t want to do anything that would help Trump be reelected. That would give him a boost they simply don’t want to chance,” he said. “It also means if they wait long enough, and they are correct that Joe Biden becomes president, then you have a much different dynamic, and a much more sustainable one.”

He rejected the idea that the Iranians, sensing that Trump is desperate, might see an advantage in negotiating an agreement with him now. “The Iranian view is that this would not be a sustainable deal, with someone as volatile as Trump,” he said.

Hook argued that the release of White, who was detained for nearly two years, was evidence that the US can negotiate from a position of strength, noting that he was returned with “no sanctions relief, no change of policy and no pallets of cash,” the last a reference to how the Obama administration returned to Iran funds it had in the US that had been frozen for nearly 30 years.

But he also argued that the Iranian people were losing out on an opportunity to avoid having “their national wealth squandered, in the Middle East and Venezuela,’’ places where Iran is actively providing support. In the two years since Trump left the Iran deal, Hook noted, “he has met with Kim Jong Un three times.” He did not note that those meetings have, so far, been fruitless, and Kim, the North Korean leader, has continued with his nuclear weapons program.

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