The Daily - Trump Trashed the Iran Nuclear Deal. Will His Be Any Better?

Episode Date: April 16, 2025

For years, President Trump has mocked the Obama administration for the nuclear agreement that it reached with Iran — a plan he disliked so much that he revoked it.Now, as he embarks on talks with Iran to reach a nuclear agreement of his own, the question is whether his administration can achieve a better deal.David E. Sanger, who covers the White House and national security, takes us inside the negotiations.Guest: David E. Sanger, the White House and National Security Correspondent for The New York Times.Background reading: President Trump wants a nuclear deal with Iran, but it must be better than President Barack Obama’s.Mr. Trump gives conflicting signals and mixed messages on Iran nuclear talks.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. Photo: Eric Lee/The New York Times Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

From the New York Times, I'm Michael Bobarro. This is The Daily. For years, President Trump has mocked the Obama administration for the nuclear deal that it reached with Iran. This is one of the worst deals ever made by any country in history. A plan he disliked so much that he revoked it. Now, as Trump embarks on talks with Iran to reach a nuclear deal of his own. We had a meeting with them on Saturday.

We have another meeting scheduled next Saturday. The question is whether he can achieve anything that's actually better. Got a problem with Iran? But I'll solve that problem. That's almost an easy one. Today, my colleague David Sanger takes us inside the negotiations. It's Wednesday, April 16th. David, always a pleasure. Great to be back with you, Michael.

Appreciate you making time for us. I think for a lot of people, the concept of President Trump suddenly wanting to negotiate a nuclear deal with Iran is genuinely surprising because it was just a few years ago during his first term as president that he tore up the last nuclear deal that the US and Iran had reached very painstakingly and since then has made a point of portraying Iran as basically evil. And yet here we are. There are actual talks happening between Iran and the United States right now.

You know, Michael, it's nothing short of mind-blowing that this is coming out of Donald Trump and his team. Especially when you consider the fact that in 2024, during the campaign, if you believe the Biden administration's Justice Department, the Iranians had actually hired some contract killers to try to assassinate Trump. Right. To say that there is no love between these two sides is a historic understatement. That's right. So what's happening now is in some ways completely unexpected because of course during the first term

Trump not only tore up the old agreement But it was pretty clear from the Iran Hawks He surrounded himself with like Mike Pompeo the Secretary of State that what they really wanted to do Was crush the Iranian regime, force it into huge changes. Yet now the strategic circumstances are quite different and Trump's approach is different. Well, give us the context we need to understand both why Trump tore up the original nuclear deal and why he would now want to essentially redo it. So no country has put more effort

into building a nuclear weapon for a longer period of time than the Iranians have. When you think about it, it's taken them well more than two decades, far longer than it took the Israelis, the Indians, the Pakistanis to go build a bomb. And that in part has been because they've been of two minds about it. On the one hand, they want a weapon. Israel has nuclear weapons. And so they felt that they should have them. But also because they believed that

as one of the Middle East's biggest, oldest powers, they should be a senior member of the nuclear club. But at the same time, they've been nervous about it because they know that as soon as they get too close to a weapon, the chances that the Israelis attack, maybe with American support, is very high. So in 2003, for example, after the United States had invaded Afghanistan and then Iraq, the Iranians deeply feared they may be next, and their political leadership sent out a message to the scientists running the nuclear weapons program that says, hey, maybe this isn't such a great idea. Let's take a pause on this whole thing.

And so they continued to produce nuclear fuel, uranium. But they did so relatively slowly. And in 2013, President Obama started a secret series of talks, and that turned into a negotiation that two years later turned out to be a way to cap the Iranian nuclear program. Right, just kind of stall it out, freeze it in place. Freeze it in place and ship 97% of the fuel that they had already produced out to Russia. And this was an agreement that had some flaws in it.

Over time, the Iranians under the agreement were allowed to begin to figure out how to make uranium more efficiently. And basically by 2030, they would have no restraints at all. But Obama thought this was actually a pretty good bet. After all, Ayatollah Khamenei was old. He was believed to be suffering from cancer.

And this would buy some time. And in return, years of sanctions approved by the United Nations and enforced by the US and Europe would get lifted. So for them, there was a lot of inducement to reach the deal. Right, and this of course is the deal that Donald Trump comes along as president,

looks at and says, this is terrible. Actually he did it as candidate. It was one of his earliest positions in 2016 that this deal was a giveaway. It was negotiated by idiots and never should have been agreed to. In fact, at one point, Maggie Haberman and I were interviewing him in 2016 in I think one of his first foreign policy interviews. And he said, you know, I would have gotten up from the table

and walked away on parts of that agreement. And so I remember pulling out a copy of the agreement and the Obama agreement was not short. It was like 150 detailed pages. And I said, what part of this would you have walked away from? Well, of course he fumbled around for a bit. But eventually when I said, well, is it long enough?

He said, no, no, no, it doesn't last long enough. And it doesn't actually dismantle anything. So those were his complaints. But the fact of the matter is when he came in as president, his own aide said to him, hey, this thing is working. They're not producing enough fuel to make a single weapon. So we understand that you hate it, but maybe you shouldn't tear it up.

But of course, he finds it objectionable enough that he does tear it up. So with all that history in mind, tear it up. But of course, he finds it objectionable enough that he does tear it up. So with all that history in mind, knowing that the original deal was imperfect, but was fundamentally working, and how much contempt there is between both sides of this, why suddenly in April of 2025, all these years later, does Trump wanna do it all over again? Well, you know, Michael, since he left office in January of 2021, a lot has changed

for the United States, for Iran, for the state of its nuclear program, even for the Israelis who, of course, have long been trying to slow this down and threatening to destroy Iran's facilities. Well, let's start with the U.S. and what basically has changed in Trump's view of this situation. Well, the main thing that's changed in Donald Trump's perception of it is that he's been given a lot of intelligence reports that suggest that Iran is wildly closer to a weapon than it was when he left office. Huh, how much closer?

Way closer. So to make a nuclear weapon, you need, most importantly, the fuel for it. You need uranium or plutonium. The Iranians have been working on enriching uranium at various sites, some of them deep underground. And usually you make uranium at a low enrichment level that enables you to produce nuclear power in a power plant. But what the Iranians have done is

enriched to just short of bomb grade. They've gone up to what the scientists call 60% enrichment. And that's a very short leap, just days or weeks, to the 90% you need to make a bomb. So in other words, they can go into the kitchen, and here I'm being a little facetious, and pretty quickly whip up the amount of enriched uranium

to get a nuclear bomb. That's right. Now, the fuel alone does not make a weapon. You then have to fabricate it, turn it into a metal, fit it into a warhead, design a triggering system and so forth. And one of the concerns that Trump got in the intelligence that the Biden administration left for him was that the Iranians were racing ahead to a faster, cruder way to build a weapon. Maybe they could make one in just months.

And you know, I think Trump recognized if they did that, it's not just the Middle East that changes, the world changes, right? Because all of a sudden, this regime, which still says it is looking for death to America and an end to the Zionists and Israel. And that's why a series of American presidents, back to Bill Clinton and George Bush, have said, one can never let Iran have a bomb. Is it fair to say that Iran only got this far because Trump tore up the last nuclear deal? Well, Donald Trump wouldn't say that he'd blame it on Joe Biden. But I would certainly say having followed this thing for a couple of decades, that Trump's decision to walk out of the agreement in 2018,

eventually gave the Iranians the opening to go race ahead. They said, look, if you're not gonna abide by the rules in this agreement, we certainly aren't. Right, so we're in a situation now where they're far closer to a weapon than they were when the US negotiated this agreement in 2015. So that explains why the US perspective and level of anxiety about this has changed. What incentive, David, would Iran have to negotiate a new deal after, as you just said,

making all this progress towards its long-held goal of having a nuclear bomb? Well, the simplest answer to that, Michael, is the Iranians suddenly have never been more exposed. After the October 7th, 2023 terror attack on Israel, the Israelis systematically destroyed Hamas, and then last fall Hezbollah, the two terror groups that were funded and basically proxies of the Iranians. Right, kind of the shield that Iran had

in the entire neighborhood around it. That's right. And then the Assad government in Syria fell. Mm-hmm. And Assad was the closest single ally that the Iranians had. Right. And then one more thing changed, and this was probably the biggest of all. You'll remember that last year there were these series of direct missile exchanges between Iran and Israel. That had never happened before.

But two things happened in this. The first is the Iranian missiles, which we thought were pretty fierce and hard to defend against, did not pierce the anti-missile defenses that Israel and the United States had carefully assembled around the region. Almost nothing got through.

And then in late October of last year, the Israelis retaliated. They very carefully did not attack the Iranian nuclear facilities, but instead they took out all of the Iranian air defenses that were around the nuclear facilities and Around Tehran got it. So here were the Iranians without their proxies without their missile defenses Totally exposed. So if you're Iran you're thinking to yourself We because Trump tore up the last nuclear deal, are getting really close to a nuclear bomb, which might trigger Israel or, I guess, the United States to come after our nuclear facilities, attack them, try to destroy them. And because of what you just said, they've never been less capable of defending against

that attack or capable of mounting retaliation. Because like you just said, if they go attack Israel, we kind of know it will mostly be a dud. That's exactly right. So when you add all of this together, President Trump decided, let's give this one try at a non-Obama, very Trumpian agreement. And he sat in the Oval Office editing a letter to Ayatollah Khamenei that basically said, I'm going to send my representatives.

You guys have just a couple of months to do this. I'm not going to let it drag on. But let's try one thing before, as the president said, I am forced to do the obvious. Right. Obvious meaning a military attack. That's right. And this work, Steve Witkoff, Trump's old friend and favorite negotiator, goes from talking to Vladimir Putin in Moscow to flying to Oman, meeting the Iranian foreign minister. And this Saturday, they are going to begin the first serious discussions on a new Iran deal. We'll be right back.

We'll be right back. So, David, now that these negotiations are actually happening, what exactly do both sides want out of them? And what would represent a good deal to both of them, the US and to Iran? And how far apart are those two visions? So of course, there's no unanimity inside any of these groups, inside Iran and inside the United States. But given that, what the Iranians want is something as close to the 2015 agreement with Obama as they can get while recognizing that Donald Trump isn't gonna take

anything that looks exactly like something Barack Obama negotiated. Mm-hmm. They would like to hold on to their facilities the way they did in the Obama era. They are willing to back off on their big enrichment of near bomb grade fuel. But they want wanna retain their capability because frankly, as they have said, they don't trust the United States and they don't trust Donald Trump

because he walked away from the last agreement the US signed. So they want to give some space between them and a bomb, but without giving up the capability of racing forward if everything turns south. Okay, I'm gonna guess that this is not what President Trump wants. Well, we don't know exactly yet what President Trump wants.

There is a lot of strategic incoherence inside the Trump administration. What have they said so far? Well, they started off by saying what they want is full dismantlement of the Iranian nuclear infrastructure. Nothing less than full dismantlement. And what does that mean though? So what the United States would like to do

is blow up the facilities, take all the fuel that they've got in the country, and ship it out again, and basically leave the Iranians with nothing that they could rebuild quickly. So what the US wants is not just a setback to Iran's nuclear program, but its destruction. Is that plausible? It would seem that Iran would have very little reason to agree to that. That's right.

They're not interested in giving up everything. And they made it clear as the negotiation started, if you're asking for us to give up the whole program, then might as well stop this negotiation now. OK, well, given how far apart the two sides are, Iran wants basically the original 2015 deal that freezes its nuclear program. The US says we want a public demolition of your entire infrastructure.

What do we know so far about the actual negotiations and how on earth they might somehow meet in the middle? So, Michael, it's been really fascinating because Steve Witkoff, who really had no experience in dealing with nuclear issues before, announced on Fox News the other day that actually he's just interested in capping the program and making sure that we could verify that the Iranians were not producing uranium at 60% purity, but instead at a much lower number, what you'd use for power plants. David, that sounds a lot, a lot like the deal Obama reached. If it sounds a lot like the old Obama agreement, it's because it's a lot like the old Obama agreement.

Right. But, you know, the demands keep changing. So on Tuesday, Witkoff backed off of his comments about merely capping the nuclear program, and he repeated the call for eliminating the entire nuclear program. So we don't know yet what the exact terms will be. But I'm sure that there will be features that let Trump claim he got a lot more than Obama did, that his deal's really different. But in reality, he may be renegotiating the exact deal

he tore up seven, correct my math, years ago and that allowed Iran to leap forward as much as it has toward a bomb? That's certainly right. So he's gonna have to prove that it's longer and stronger. Remember, the original deal was gonna expire in 2030. Well, that seemed a long way away when they were doing this in 2015,

but it's only five years from now. It's not very long. So it would certainly have to have a much longer timeline. And then there's something harder, because I mean, you can measure how much nuclear fuel they have, but Witkoff also said that they needed to verify that they weren't working on what he called nuclear triggers,

the technology to make a weapon. And that's really hard to go do because you can hide that work in a million different places, and you can do a lot of it virtually on computers. Oh, and by the way, you can buy nuclear triggers from a willing seller. Who are among the Iranians' best new friends in recent times?

The North Koreans. And they've mastered this technology. David, assuming that Trump can accept a deal that ultimately looks a lot like the deal he has railed against for years and years and years, let's talk about Iran for just another moment. What would Iran get out of a deal that freezes all of its nuclear program, not destroy it, but just freezes it, that wouldzes all of its nuclear program, not destroy it, but just freezes it, that would make it worse its while.

What they would get, Michael, is relief from these crushing economic sanctions that have limited the amount of oil that Iran can ship around the world, that has made it impossible to go invest in Iran, that has left their air fleet without spare parts, that has made it difficult to get even medical help, and that has stopped their connections to the world's banking system. So they would want all of these kind of sanctions, which Trump reimposed in 2018 when he pulled out of the deal, they would

want all of those lifted. So, David, at this point, recognizing that these talks are in very early stages, what are the chances in your mind that a deal gets reached? I think the chance is pretty good, but the history of Iranian nuclear negotiations is that people walk right up to sealing a deal, and then in the end, it's the decision of one man, Ayatollah Khamenei, who previously forbid even direct discussions with the United States, but now is issuing cautious sounding statements saying, well, let's basically play this out and see what they're willing to offer.

But if there is no deal, based on everything you've said here, what would happen is that the United States and Israel would eventually need to undertake some sort of military operation to destroy Iran's nuclear facilities. And Iran is pretty powerless to stop it or to meaningfully retaliate against it. And so, is that scenario all that problematic for the U.S. and Israel? Well, you know, Donald Trump is a big fan of coercive diplomacy.

So what's he done in recent weeks as they have gotten ready to have this discussion? He's taken the American fleet of B-2 bombers and he's put them on an American base that is within reach of Iran. And the Iranians know just what that plane means, because it's the only plane capable of lifting this enormous bunker busting bomb the US developed just for Iranian and North Korean facilities. And the message to the Iranians is, if you don't strike this deal,

this thing's going right through the deep underground facilities you have built. Right. Iran is back into a corner. One way or another, it's going to have to give up its nuclear program at the stage it's in right now. That is the message the US is sending. But I'm sure that there are some factions within Iran that says,

this is a bluff. Donald Trump doesn't want to get sucked into another war in the Middle East. That's a very big bet. You're suggesting that Iran might take to kind of play chicken with Donald Trump and those B-2 bombers and the very real possibility that we might attack it. Well, you know, Michael, for the Iranians, this is really a, you bet your country moment.

If they say no deal, we can't put up with the American demands, then they still have the sanctions on them. They are vulnerable to the Israelis going to President Trump and saying, see, we told you they weren't serious. So the only solution here is a military one. On the other hand, if they do cap the program, then of course their entire position in the region as a power to be reckoned with is really harmed.

So the Iranians are up for a really tough choice here. And their big question is, can they find a face saving way to avoid military conflict? Can they manage an unpredictable President Trump and a diminished set of defenses? Well, David, thank you very much. Appreciate it. Thank you, Michael. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today.

On Tuesday, President Trump escalated his standoff with Harvard University by threatening to remove its tax-exempt status after the school refused to comply with his demands for policy changes. Such a decision, over time, could cost Harvard billions of dollars. It's unclear exactly how Trump could carry out the threat. Under federal law, a president is prohibited from directly ordering the IRS to conduct the kind of investigation that might result in Harvard losing its tax-exempt status. And… result in Harvard losing its tax exempt status. And.

Fewer than 100 days, this new administration has done so much damage and so much destruction. It's kind of breathtaking it could happen that soon. In his first speech since leaving office, former President Joe Biden criticized the Trump White House for its drastic cuts to the government bureaucracy, focusing in particular on how many workers it has forced out of the Social Security Administration. That, Biden said, now threatens to break the program's sacred promise to the tens of millions

of Americans who rely on social security. In the 90 years since Franklin Roosevelt created the social security system, people have always gotten their social security checks. They've gotten them during wartime, during recessions, during a pandemic. No matter what, they got them. But now, for the first time ever, them. But now, for the first time ever, that might change and be a calamity for millions of families, millions of people. Today's episode was produced by Rochelle Bonja and Mary Wilson. It was edited by Patricia Willans, contains original music by Dan Powell and Pat McCusker, and was engineered by Chris Wood. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsberg of Wonderly.

That's it for the Daily. I'm Michael Baboro. See you tomorrow.