Bad Ideas Never Die
By 
Two articles this morning. David Sanger takes another look at an operation to “take the uranium” from Iran and sounds doubtful, although he quotes a couple of people who believe it’s absolutely necessary (gift link). Apparently Trump is still mulling it. Patrick Wintour has a second article in The Guardian about the Witkoff-Kushner negotiating team. It covers some of the ground of the first, with a lot more. Wintour is one of the few people covering this fiasco.
Nothing has changed in my assessment of the foolishness of a special operation to seize Iran’s stock of 60% enriched uranium from what I wrote almost two weeks ago. I added a bit this morning in a thread on Bluesky.
Having covered the negotiations leading up to the JCPOA in detail, I’ve wanted to know how Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, with no visible backup, have handled negotiations supposed to lead to an even better deal. It’s possible to argue that the only purpose in their negotiations was to buy time for Trump and Bibi Netanyahu to attack Iran, but I think the evidence leans toward some intention of achieving an agreement. The difficulty is that much of the substance of the JCPOA lay in an appendix of numbers and nuclear concepts. There is no evidence that Witkoff or Kushner could understand that appendix, much less negotiate something like it.
There’s a lot in the Guardian article, and I recommend reading the whole thing. A few selections:
…in the five sessions of the first round of talks last year – held before the 12-day June war – Witkoff rarely took notes and brought with him only Michael Anton, a hawkish essayist and political philosopher with no specialism in the Iran nuclear file. Anton was supposed to have an unnamed technical team back in Washington, and at times, as in May 2025, they could produce hard-core technical demands, but this level of expertise was never in the talks.
Might be worth checking to see who was on that technical team, if anyone.
Iran has to take some responsibility. It has never published its seven-page written offer for a new deal, including the annexe, which was shown to Witkoff during the final round of talks in Geneva, despite calls from inside Iran to do so. Araghchi has said he hoped the truth of what happened on the final day of talks, 26 February, would soon become known. He could do this himself by publishing Iran’s offer – one that Jonathan Powell, the UK national security adviser who was present at the talks, thought worth pursuing. Kushner admitted a deal could have been presented that was better than the Obama nuclear deal secured in 2015.
From what I’ve read so far, it looks like both the manner and substance of the Iranian proposal were similar to how things were done for the JCPOA. But Witkoff and Kushner probably didn’t know that.
The biggest roadblock was that Iran refused to abandon its insistence on the right to enrich uranium for its future nuclear programme, and this would require eventually being allowed to run 30 centrifuges, far fewer than at present.
Again, capable negotiators would have known that Iran would never give up enrichment entirely. But, wow, 30 centrifuges is MUCH less than they’ve been running.
Katariina Simonen, adjunct professor at the Finnish national defence university, said: “The Trump administration is very impenetrable. It is a closed circle. The US arms control community has been at pains to offer real expert advice on nuclear physics, but the Trump team does not seem interested. Probably the biggest frustration is that this deal would have allowed the IAEA back into Iran, and so many issues could then have been resolved.”