US-Iran talks: Obama’s top Iran negotiator on Trump’s shenanigans

Between blocking the Strait of Hormuz and posting blasphemous AI images of himself as Jesus, President Donald Trump claims he still wants to strike a deal with Iran’s government to end the current conflict, reopen the Straits and curb the country’s nuclear program.

So far, he has been unsuccessful – and during his first term in office he scrapped the US’s previous nuclear deal with Iran, negotiated under Barack Obama in 2015.

To find out how the US and Iran got to yes last time – and why they weren’t under Trump – Today, explain co-host Noel King spoke with former Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman, who led the Obama administration team that secured a nuclear deal with Iran.

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s a lot more in the full episode, so take a listen Today, explain wherever you get podcasts including Apple Podcasts, Pandoraand Spotify.

What do you think it will take for the US to get a new deal with Iran now?

It depends on what the goals are for the president and for Iran. Right now, President Trump wants to make sure that Iran does not have a nuclear weapon. He wants to open the Strait of Hormuz, he wants to stop Iran from funding proxies like Hezbollah, Hamas and the Houthis in Yemen because he thinks they pose a risk to Israel, which is our ally and all the countries in the Gulf region.

Iran, on the other hand, has control over the Strait of Hormuz, so they want to keep that leverage because it allows them to project power in the region. They want to ensure that they maintain a right to enrichment and they want to continue to have relations with Hezbollah and Hamas and the Houthis.

There is a big gap and it is curious because the negotiating team on our side is quite small. The negotiating team on their side includes people like Abbas Araghchi, who was my counterpart during the 2015 negotiations. He is now the Secretary of State and he knows every detail of that agreement.

When you were negotiating with Iran, there were moments when you looked back when you thought, It’s just not going to happen?

Absolutely. There were many points along the way where I told my peers, “If you can’t do it, you can’t do it.”

We thought we were very close to a set of parameters and the then supreme leader gave a speech and laid out a whole new set of parameters that I think surprised even his foreign minister.

We had to figure out how we could get from where we were, what we thought was on the way to an agreement, to now considering what the supreme leader had said publicly.

We know, in part because President Trump articulated it early and often, that there were some Americans who thought we could get a better deal with Iran. What do you hear as the main complaint and what do you say to those critics?

The critics say that the strongest part of the agreement only lasted for 15 years. They wanted it to last forever. We argued that it gave us a one-year breakout timeline so that we would have a year — if we somehow discovered that Iran was cheating, which we thought was highly unlikely — to do something about it.

I think some critics wanted to go to war. They thought they could create a regime change. We have continually told the US Congress, if we go to war, it could close the Strait of Hormuz, it could raise gas prices, it could take the international economy down, it could mean the lives of our military and an enormous cost to our economy and to American citizens.

Are the right people at the negotiating table?

I find it hard to believe that Vice President Vance, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner can be successful in two weeks. I fully suspect that the negotiations will continue for more than two weeks if they gain any traction at all.

I think part of the reason the vice president is there is because Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, who have no formal role in government, don’t have credibility with Iran because twice before we attacked when they were negotiating with Iran.

It’s hard to believe that someone is going to continue negotiating with you if they attacked you in the middle of negotiations the other two times.

Is there a risk this time that the US comes out weaker and Iran comes out stronger?

I think it is very difficult to be so reductive. There are parts of Iran that are weaker. They don’t have the navy they once had. They don’t have the missile programs they once had. They don’t have the core programs they once had.

They can rebuild it all and if they get millions of dollars in tolls and sanctions from the United States, they will be able to rebuild all that capacity faster. But at the moment they are set back.

The United States, in my opinion, has been set back. We just spent billions of dollars. We have reduced our inventory of weapons that we may need for other theaters. We have undermined our alliances. We put Russia and China in stronger positions. We removed oil sanctions from Russia and oil sanctions from Iran, which were already putting money in their coffers, giving Russia more money so they can continue their terrible and illegal war against Ukraine.

All of this cost everyday average Americans much more out of their pocketbooks. The regime now in place in Iran is more hard-line than the one before, if you can believe it, and may decide that it must have a nuclear weapon to deter future attacks.

If Iran decides it wants a nuclear weapon, I can assure you many other countries, even some of our closest friends around the world, will think they need a nuclear weapon as well.