The Middle East has radically changed.
Suddenly, both US President Donald Trump and Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei do not merely want to cut a nuclear deal and avoid a larger conflict; they are now both desperate for such a deal.
Khamenei has decided to ignore those within the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps who opposed making major concessions to roll back his nuclear program to reach a nuclear deal, after having let them dictate policy since 2019.
Likewise, Trump is paying lip service to Israel and to American officials who are hawkish about eliminating Tehran’s nuclear capabilities. Nevertheless, in practical terms, he is ignoring the repeated advice not only of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu but also of Mossad Director David Barnea and IDF Intelligence Chief Maj.-Gen. Shlomi Binder on some of the most critical details of a potential nuclear deal.
Khamenei has made it clear that he will not permanently dismantle his uranium-enrichment centrifuges, but he is willing to pause enrichment and give away much of the existing inventory of enriched uranium.
This is essentially the same formula as the 2015 JCPOA nuclear deal, which Trump has always called the worst deal ever.
So, Trump cannot allow the deal to close without achieving some other creative concessions. This is especially true, since the same deal in 2025 would leave Iran only months away from nuclear weapons, and not a year away, because of its technological advances.
Its top scientists now have thousands of advanced centrifuges working and enough 60% highly enriched uranium to weaponize enough uranium for several nuclear weapons in a matter of months – all of which they did not know how to do in 2015.
How can Trump achieve a better nuclear deal than the 2015 JCPOA
What are some creative new concessions that Trump could say he got, and the Obama administration failed to get, but that Khamenei could also live with?
It is not going to be the destruction of all Iranian centrifuges or the prohibition of any uranium enrichment even at the lowest 3.67% level, which is several levels down from 60%.
There could be a complete pause of enriching uranium for a short period of time, a year or three years, followed by a longer time period, allowing Iran to enrich uranium at the 3.67% level but not above.
It could be placing a larger number of centrifuges in storage than was done under the JCPOA.
Under the 2015 deal, fewer than 6,000 centrifuges, or about 25%, kept running, while another 75% were put in storage.
Trump could get the Islamic Republic to agree to drop its running centrifuges down to 3,000 or some other number smaller than 6,000.
Also under the 2015 deal, the IAEA did all of the inspections of Iran’s nuclear facilities.
One leaked idea has been that Khamenei could agree to allow US inspectors into many of the nuclear facilities – and even make some of the facilities joint business ventures.
It could be allowing nuclear inspectors into more sites than the IAEA was allowed into in 2015.
Moreover, it could be agreeing to some temporary pause of Iranian progress with certain ballistic missiles, as this issue was left completely out of the JCPOA.
Or it could be an Iranian promise that none of its proxies would attack Americans anywhere in the world, another issue left out of the 2015 nuclear deal.
Yet another idea has been to have essentially the same deal as the JCPOA, but to have the restrictions apply for longer than the 10- to 15-year term of the 2015 nuclear deal.
What all of these solutions have in common is that they would allow Trump to claim a better deal than the Obama administration, but without actually permanently solving the problem, while leaving Khamenei a path to potentially return to the nuclear threshold in a matter of months by breaking out some advanced centrifuges that are far more efficient than the 6,000 to 20,000 centrifuges from 2015.
This seems to be where Trump and Khamenei are taking the region.
If it happens in this way, Israel’s unique window to blow up all or most of Iran’s nuclear program in a time period when Khamenei’s air defenses are down – after Israel struck them last October 26 – will have passed.