The stall between the negotiating team of President Trump and Iran is reduced to this: if the United States are willing to risk allowing Iran to continue producing nuclear fuel if the alternative is not an agreement and the possibility of another war in the Middle East.
For Mr. Trump and his special correspondent, Steve Witkoff, the negotiations with Iran are a new experience and the insistence of Iran who will never give his ability to enrich the uranium on his soil threaten to sink an agreement on the fact that the president only a few weeks ago provided with confidence at hand.
But it is almost exactly the same irritating dilemma that President Barack Obama faced a decade ago. With reluctance, Mr. Obama and his assistants concluded that the only path to an agreement was to allow Iran to continue producing small quantities of nuclear fuel, maintaining its nuclear centrifuges that run and its scientists work.
The agreement – an agreement that every republican at Congress voted against, together with some Democrats – contained Iran's ambitions for three years until Mr. Trump pulled out of it. Iran had been compliant with the terms of the agreement.
Mr. Trump is now essentially facing the same choices that have faced his first predecessor. And, like Mr. Obama, he is facing a probable opposition by Iran Hawks in the United States and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, who went in front of a joint session of the congress a decade ago and urged the legislators to refuse the agreement that Obama had negotiated. In recent months, Netanyahu has pushed for a preventive strike on Iran's nuclear sites.
“There is a bit of déjà vu here,” said Wendy Sherman, who was the main negotiator of the 2015 agreement for the Obama administration. “Clearly there are US senators, members of the Congress and Israeli officials who insist on the complete dismantling of Iranian structures and zero enrichment. We have faced the same challenges.”
He said he wanted Mr. Witkoff well, observing that he recently said that in the negotiations of Iran, as in New York's real estate agreements, it was important to understand what everyone was looking for and making them feel as if they had something.
“He has a difficult task,” said Mrs. Sherman, who was later deputy secretary of state.
But the Iranian officials, observed, “have been very clear that need to enrich, and not only in tiny quantities. And I doubt they will move from that position”. He observed that Mr. Trump has some available tools that Mr. Obama has not done, including a compliant congress and more room for maneuver to raise embargores on Iran.
Mr. Trump seemed to recognize on Monday that the negotiations had taken a demanding turning point. “They are just asking things you can't do,” Trump said on Monday, seem frustrated. “They don't want to give up what they have to give up. You know what it is: they are looking for enrichment.”
Iran claims not to have formally responded to Mr. Trump and Mr. Witkoff, who had conceived what he had hoped was an innovative compromise. According to his proposal, Iran was allowed to continue to enrich himself at low levels for several years, until a consortium had formed that would have provided nuclear fuel for the power plants in the Middle East.
The fuel production of the consortium will take place somewhere in the region. Under the proposal of the United States, the production could not take place in the Iranian territory. For years, other proposals have been floated to move production to the islands in the Persian Gulf, where the structures would have been built above ground and could be more easily monitored or destroyed.
Since probably it would have taken years, perhaps a decade, to make the consortium work, Mr. Witkoff saw the proposal as a graceful way for everyone to declare a victory. Iran could say that he was enriching for the near future. Mr. Trump could claim to have obtained something that Mr. Obama did not do: a commitment to end the enrichment.
So far it hasn't worked. Iranian officials said they were open to the idea of a consortium, provided that it is on Iranian soil.
The Iranian supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, rejected the idea of western stratagem to bring Tehran out of the nuclear fuel business. But both Mr. Witkoff and Iranian negotiators include the risk of letting the negotiations collapse: Mr. Netanyahu could grasp the inability to renew his campaign to undertake military actions.
Since neither of them wants to risk a war, the two sides are avoiding statements that the negotiations are in a dead end. Negotiators meet this weekend in Oman, who acts as a mediator.
Nobody is talking about Deadlocks. Trump, who asked in a letter of early April to the supreme leader that an agreement must be concluded in two months, is no longer discussing the deadlines.
Majid Takht-Vanchi, Iranian Foreign Deputy Minister and the main nuclear negotiator, declared the state press agency in a video interview with Irna, which does not matter how long they take the negotiations, “one point is certain, and this is that the enrichment must take place in Iran”. He added: “This is our red line”.
This leaves Mr. Trump in a difficult point, they admit government officials. The Iranian threat is greater than a decade ago: the country has now produced so much fuel to level levels close to bombs that could churn out the fuel for 10 nuclear weapons in a short time. (Transforming into an operating weapon would take months more, perhaps a year, the experts say.)
And the fact that Iran's aerial defenses were compromised in an Israelian missile attack of October led Mr. Netanyahu to argue that there has never been a better opportunity to attack the country's nuclear sites, even if Israel does not have the necessary weapons to reach the deepest production sites. The Iranian Supreme National Safety Council declared in a Monday declaration that would have reacted with strikes on the nuclear plants of Israel if Israel attacked Iranian nuclear sites.
“The most sensitive sites are half a underground millet”, Rafael Grossi, general manager of the International Atomic Energy Agency, which inspects the nuclear structures of Iran, said recently, noting that he had visited the site.
Trump, Mr. Witkoff, the secretary of state Marco Rubio and military leaders met in Camp David on Sunday evening, according to reports to discuss diplomatic and military options. It is not clear which conclusions have reached, if present.
The next morning, still at the presidential retreat, Trump spoke to Mr. Netanyahu, in part to keep him informed, but above all, said an official, to make sure he had not overturned the negotiations by threatening imminent military action.
That conversation was only the last of an increasingly tense relationship between Mr. Trump and Mr. Netanyahu. The Israeli Prime Minister affirm his collaborators, was surprised by how insistent Mr. Trump was in the survey for a diplomatic solution.
The removal of Michael Waltz as Mr. Trump's national security councilor was widely seen in Washington as motivated, in part, by the traditional and difficult opinions of Waltz on Iran, who were the norm in the Republican party in the first term of Mr. Trump.
In fact, Mr. Trump's party is now divided between Hawks who insists on the full dismantling of Iran's infrastructures and a more isolationist field that says that the most important thing is to avoid sucking the United States in another war in the Middle East.
So far Mr. Trump and his closest helpers have danced between these two fields.
And the inspectors say that Iranian nuclear centrifuges are turning faster than ever, giving the country more fuel that could be used to build a weapon – or be exchanged in an agreement.