June 24, 2025 • 17 mins
President Trump lashed out at Iran and Israel today over concerns that a ceasefire between the two was already breaking down. But going from a fragile truce to lasting peace is complicated, particularly as Iran tries to advance its nuclear ambitions.
On today’s Big Take podcast, host David Gura sits down with former US Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz, who helped negotiate an Iran deal reached in 2015, and with Bloomberg’s Nick Wadhams. They discuss the current state of Iran’s nuclear program, what’s succeeded at the negotiating table in the past and President Trump’s objectives as he tries to broker a deal.
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio News.
Speaker 2 (00:10):
On Monday night, President Trump announced on Truth Social that
he'd help negotiate a ceasefire between Israel and Iran. Then
on Tuesday, the President criticized both countries for threatening that
fragile pause.
Speaker 1 (00:23):
It just feels like there are so many ways in
which this thing could unwind.
Speaker 2 (00:29):
Nick Wadhams covers national security for.
Speaker 1 (00:31):
Bloomberg, and it feels like we're very far from a
situation where we'd be able to enter into diplomacy to
come to some sort of longer term resolution.
Speaker 2 (00:39):
But even if a diplomatic solution seems out of reach,
it has happened before. About a decade ago, months of
negotiations led to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action the JCPOA.
Speaker 3 (00:50):
In February of twenty fifteen, when the negotiations were at
a bit of a standstill, President Obama decided that I
would join Secretary Kerry, the Secretary of State, in the talks.
Speaker 2 (01:03):
Ernest Monese played a big role in those talks as
President Obama's Energy secretary. He's also a nuclear physicist. Today
he's the head of a nonprofit that advocates for nuclear disarmament.
He's been watching the latest out of Iran closely, and
he argues it's time for a new agreement.
Speaker 3 (01:20):
I think there are many many ways to go about this,
but it's time to go about it.
Speaker 2 (01:25):
But with a shaky ceasefire in place, Just what would
it take to get back to negotiations and what's at
stake if that doesn't happen. I'm David Gerret and this
is the Big Take from Bloomberg News Today. On the show,
I speak with former US Energy Secretary Ernest Moneese and
(01:46):
with Bloomberg's Nick Wadhams about President Trump's approach to Iran,
the state of the country's nuclear program, and what previous
negotiations can tell us about the moment we're in now.
Bloomberg's Nick Watams has been tracking the fast moving developments
between the US, Israel, and Iran, and he and I
(02:08):
smoke on Tuesday morning. I want to ask you first
about the ceasefire President Trump announced last night on Truth
Social help us make sense of it? What is President
Trump trying to accomplish here?
Speaker 1 (02:19):
I think the President chiefly is trying to get himself
a foreign policy win and to make it look like
he has a greater deal of influence than he actually has.
But you have this fascinating situation where the President is
essentially conducting foreign policy by tweet and announced this ceasefire
that seemed to catch even some members of his own
(02:42):
administration off guard. He basically, via JD. Vance and Steve Witcoff,
back channeled with Israel and then got the Kataris to
pull Iran on board. And I think the bigger signal
there is that, in a lot of ways, everybody kind
of wants this thing to end. So he found a
fortuitous moment to essentially claim victory.
Speaker 2 (03:04):
We heard his frustration on Tuesday morning as he talked
to reporters before he left Washington for for a NATO summit.
Speaker 4 (03:10):
We basically have two countries that have been fighting so
long and so hard that they don't know what they're doing.
Speaker 2 (03:17):
Do you understand how fragile is this sees fire?
Speaker 3 (03:20):
Nick?
Speaker 1 (03:21):
I would say, this is a very very fragile ceasefire.
The President essentially said, you know, there's going to be
peace in the region, but I have a lot of
questions about that. What if investigators or US intelligence find
there's another site, as Iran has intimated, where it's continuing enrichment,
or what if the US finds those nine hundred pounds
(03:42):
of enriched uranium which they've lost track of, and they decide, okay,
another bunker buster bomb is needed to take out that uranium.
So there are all sorts of those elements. But then
there's the Israel component. What if Israel finds a target
of opportunity or a moment of opportunity where it can
take out another Iranian science who's involved with the nuclear program,
(04:02):
or another military general. I mean, it just feels like
there are so many ways in which this thing could unwind,
and it feels like we're very far from a situation
where we'd be able to enter into diplomacy to come
to some sort of longer term resolution.
Speaker 2 (04:16):
I want to dig into one part of that, and
it is sort of what it's going to take to
figure out how successful those strikes were. How difficult is
it going to be to assess how much material was
at those sites, how much might have been moved.
Speaker 1 (04:28):
Well, there are a couple of things. One is, in
terms of eliminating the material that Iran needs to make
a bomb, there is no assessment that currently exists to
suggest that that material has been taken off the table,
so the US has basically lost track of where that
enriched uranium is. The question is can Iran produce more?
(04:51):
And then could it produce a bomb, a weapon that
could deliver a nuclear warhead? And Iran is still seen
as being some ways away from that. So you have
assessments now saying that Iran has essentially been pushed back.
But the challenge when you look at enrichment, of course,
is that Fordoh is a facility that's buried underneath a mountain.
That's why they needed those bunker buster bombs. At the moment,
(05:14):
we're still waiting for a lot of that information to
come in.
Speaker 2 (05:17):
On Tuesday, the New York Times reported the US strikes
didn't collapse Iran's underground nuclear facilities and quote set back
Iran's nuclear program by only a few months. Former Energy
Secretary Ernest Mones spent a lot of time when he
was negotiating the Iran deal on verification how the international
community could assess what Iran was doing and what it wasn't.
(05:40):
I asked him how far away he thinks Iran is
from developing a nuclear weapon.
Speaker 3 (05:45):
When you hear these different timeframes often what you're hearing
is apples and oranges being compared. For example, when one
talks about weeks pre attack, that was correct in terms
of the time would take from where they were starting
with highly enriched uranium to reach weapons grade. For a
(06:08):
substantial number of weapons, that would have been weeks. That's
not the same as you often hear as building a
nuclear weapon, So then you hear some say, well, it's
three years away. I think that's a little bit on
the high side in the sense that there are many
intermediate places you can go in building much cruder weapons,
(06:31):
which are nevertheless would make for a very very bad
day if one were to explode.
Speaker 2 (06:37):
I saw that Anthony Blincoln, who was President Biden's Secretary
of State and someone with whom you worked in the
Obama administration, had a piece in The Times on Tuesday,
and he called the strikes on Iran by the US
and Israel unwise and unnecessary. But he added that now
that it's done, I very much hope it succeeded. Do
you feel similarly about what's transpired here over the last
few days.
Speaker 3 (06:56):
Well, first of all, I think there's no question that
militarily it was a success. Whether success means FODOH was
badly damaged or obliterated, I think remains to be seen,
but clearly lots of damage to that facility and also
to the Matan's enrichment facility. However, I would distinguish damage
of facilities with curtailment of a possible nuclear weapons.
Speaker 2 (07:21):
Program, looking at how much damage has been done, how
much time and effort is that going to take.
Speaker 3 (07:25):
It's likely that we'll never really quite know the exact
level of damage, but I don't think it matters that
much to me. It's going to be much more now
what they elect to do or not do in covert sites.
Before the US bombing, Iran made the statement that they
had a third undisclosed location. I'd have no idea if
(07:48):
that's true or not, but I wouldn't rule it out.
And when you combine that with the enriched geranium that
was probably moved and hidden, and you combine that with
their extensive work on other elements of a nuclear weapon
up until two thousand and three, I don't think we
should doubt that they had the capability of building a
(08:10):
nuclear weapons, certainly a crude one, in a reasonably prompt time.
Speaker 2 (08:15):
How difficult is it to move nuclear materials around. So
if an advance of these attacks, Aroon wanted to move
some of that uranium, how hard an undertaking is that?
Speaker 3 (08:24):
That would be simple. It's just cylinders filled with a
gaseous form uranium hexafluoride to be precise, in basically metal tanks,
and you can just load them onto a truck and
move them. We may not ever know how much of
that highly enriched uranium escaped the bombing. If I were
(08:46):
a military planner, I would be assuming all of it
was moved.
Speaker 2 (08:51):
After the break? What could bring Iran back to the
negotiating table after a blistering few weeks of fighting in
the Middle East? On Tuesday, after President Trump announced a
ceasefire between Israel and Iran, I sat down separately with
(09:15):
former Energy Secretary Ernest Monees and with Nick Wadhams, who
oversees Bloomberg's coverage of national security. We've heard from the President,
we have read his post on social media. What don't
we know about what he wants to happen next? Is
it direct talks? It seems like it is a return
to diplomacy in some form.
Speaker 1 (09:34):
I mean, that is the great question that we have
all been trying to answer because it has felt for
a long time like the President is not actually interested
in the sort of diplomacy that would lead to an
ironclad agreement. I mean, people think of the Joint Comprehensive
Plan of Action, the previous nuclear deal that was done
under the Obama administration that took more than two years.
(09:57):
The President this time essentially said a month to go, Hey, Roan,
you've got sixty days. Come to a deal in sixty days.
And they had these periodic conversations between Steve Whitcoff, his envoy,
and Iranian officials, but there's never been a sense that
they were actually sitting in a room and hammering out
the concrete and difficult details that would produce a lasting agreement.
Speaker 2 (10:20):
Ernest Monies was one of the lead negotiators the JCPOA,
working in parallel with President Obama's Secretary of State John Carey.
Speaker 3 (10:28):
My job was to make sure that the way President
Obama expressed it was that if they were to go
all out with what they had to produce the material
for one nuclear weapon, it would credibly take a year
or longer. So that was one requirement. The second requirement
(10:50):
was to come back with very stringent verification and transparency approaches,
and we did. We came back with unparalleled verification measures.
Speaker 2 (11:02):
But the deal Monies and his colleagues worked on didn't
survive Trump's first term. He withdrew the US from the
agreement in twenty eighteen.
Speaker 4 (11:10):
As I have said many times, the Iran deal was
one of the worst and most one sided transactions the
United States has ever entered into.
Speaker 2 (11:21):
Nick has he said anything in the intervening years intervening
period to give us an indication of what he wants
in an agreement with Iran That wasn't there in that
first one.
Speaker 1 (11:31):
Right, So, the whole premise of the JCPOA was you
put these limits on Iranian enrichment. You don't completely remove
their ability to enrich uranium. You just put it so
that they can't enrich to weapons grade. And then you
essentially put in a time limit, you say about fifteen years,
and then after that they would reassess. And the deal
was very explicit in not putting limits on Iran's ballistic
(11:55):
missile program, on its funding for proxy groups in the region,
on all the concerns that US and European officials had.
But the idea was Okay, let's sort of fold Iran
back into the international community. Let's build goodwill, let's get
its economy humming, give it an incentive to essentially stay
on the path, on the straight and narrow, and then
(12:16):
in fifteen years we'll all come back and reassess and
put new limits on and there will be this unified
front with Russia and China and all the other signatories
to the deal. So the President in twenty eighteen basically
looked the deal and said, well, this only puts very
time constrained limits on Iranian ye Richmond, but doesn't require
anything else, any other limits that are the reason why
(12:38):
Iran is also such a threat to the region. So
he blew it up. And then subsequently the Trump administration
had an envoy, Brian Hook who went in and tried
to come to a new deal to impose more strict sunsets,
to put more limits on the Iranian program, and he
was unable to do that, in part because Trump wouldn't
sign off on it.
Speaker 2 (12:57):
The US was talking with Iran again during President Trump's
second term, but Iran called off those talks after the
Israeli strikes. Nick, where do you see things going from here?
I go back to the last time Iran in the
United States were negotiating a deal, and it seemed like
Iran had more optionality. And I look at the state
of Iran, its economy under sanctions, the fact that it's
(13:18):
been hit by these strikes from Israel and the US,
its proxies in the Middle East have been diminished.
Speaker 1 (13:23):
You know, it's like a fascinating puzzle piece, because you're right,
Iran has been severely weakened. It seems that it does
not have the hand that it had back then to
play anymore. And that's what President Trump is essentially counting.
On the flip side, is that what you had in
twenty fifteen when those conversations were going on was at
(13:45):
least some element of trust that if you came to
this deal, the two sides would adhere to it. And
then once President Trump came in and blew up that deal,
you essentially gave the hardliners in Iran all the evidence
they needed to say, Hey, the Americans can never be trusted.
Why would we ever get into a deal with them?
Speaker 3 (14:05):
And that was what.
Speaker 1 (14:06):
Actually hung up the negotiations from the Biden administration with Iran.
So you have this situation where On the one hand,
Iran is severely weakened and does have an incentive to
get into a deal. But also the hardliners in Iran
who oppose that idea have all the evidence they need
to show that the US can't be trusted. And then
(14:26):
you also have plenty of examples for Iran countries like Russia,
North Korea, even Cuba where they've been under massive economic
sanction for many, many years, and in some ways the
regime is only more powerful than it ever was. So
there is an incentive structure for the leadership in Iran
to say, let's just hang on and keep up this
(14:48):
opposition with the West.
Speaker 2 (14:49):
I asked ernest Monies, what would or could incentivize Iran
to pursue a diplomatic solution Again.
Speaker 3 (14:56):
To come back to the table, I think we have
to look at what are the strategic needs of all
the players in this What does everybody need out of
a negotiation. Well, what Iran says they need is the
ability to use nuclear technology peacefully. They want nuclear electricity, fine,
(15:17):
they like medical isotopes, cure cancer and the like. Fine,
we have no problem with those peaceful uses. What the
West will need and Israel will need is considerable confidence
that Iran is not engaging, especially in a covert program
(15:37):
to build a nuclear weapon. I for one, think that
an interesting approach to a new negotiation, and I have
reason to believe Iran would be interested in pursuing a
regional development of nuclear energy and its supply chain that
would include enrichment and fuel fabrication, potentially in various countries
(16:00):
in the region, but not under any one country's control.
So again, providing some assurance that there will not be
a diversion of materials or technology to a weapons program.
Speaker 2 (16:12):
Lastly, I want to ask you about the key ingredient
to any successful negotiation, and that, of course is trust.
Is it possible, after all that's happened, for these two
countries to get together in a room and for the
US and Iran to trust one another enough to engage
in vilent negotiations.
Speaker 3 (16:30):
Well, you know, in twenty fifteen, when we were negotiating
the original Iran deal, my phrase was always don't trust
and verify, and I think that's going to be the
approach here on all sides. So again I go back
to those strategic objectives Iran being able to use nuclear
technology peacefully, the West and Israel and other countries being
(16:53):
confident that if they were to try a covert program,
at least the bar would be set very very high
for detection, and that Iran and other countries in the
region feel that they have security of supply to pursue
peaceful uses. So I think those are the three objectives.
They will not be based upon trust, They will have
(17:15):
to be based upon verification and on processes in which
Iran also feels confident that they will have access to
what they need.
Speaker 2 (17:30):
This is The Big Take from Bloomberg News. I'm David Gera.
To get more from The Big Take and unlimited access
to all of Bloomberg dot com, subscribe today at Bloomberg
dot com slash podcast offer. If you like this episode,
make sure to follow and review The Big Take wherever
you listen to podcasts. It helps people find the show.
Thanks for listening. We'll be back tomorrow.
Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio News.
Speaker 2 (00:10):
On Monday night, President Trump announced on Truth Social that
he'd help negotiate a ceasefire between Israel and Iran. Then
on Tuesday, the President criticized both countries for threatening that
fragile pause.
Speaker 1 (00:23):
It just feels like there are so many ways in
which this thing could unwind.
Speaker 2 (00:29):
Nick Wadhams covers national security for.
Speaker 1 (00:31):
Bloomberg, and it feels like we're very far from a
situation where we'd be able to enter into diplomacy to
come to some sort of longer term resolution.
Speaker 2 (00:39):
But even if a diplomatic solution seems out of reach,
it has happened before. About a decade ago, months of
negotiations led to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action the JCPOA.
Speaker 3 (00:50):
In February of twenty fifteen, when the negotiations were at
a bit of a standstill, President Obama decided that I
would join Secretary Kerry, the Secretary of State, in the talks.
Speaker 2 (01:03):
Ernest Monese played a big role in those talks as
President Obama's Energy secretary. He's also a nuclear physicist. Today
he's the head of a nonprofit that advocates for nuclear disarmament.
He's been watching the latest out of Iran closely, and
he argues it's time for a new agreement.
Speaker 3 (01:20):
I think there are many many ways to go about this,
but it's time to go about it.
Speaker 2 (01:25):
But with a shaky ceasefire in place, Just what would
it take to get back to negotiations and what's at
stake if that doesn't happen. I'm David Gerret and this
is the Big Take from Bloomberg News Today. On the show,
I speak with former US Energy Secretary Ernest Moneese and
(01:46):
with Bloomberg's Nick Wadhams about President Trump's approach to Iran,
the state of the country's nuclear program, and what previous
negotiations can tell us about the moment we're in now.
Bloomberg's Nick Watams has been tracking the fast moving developments
between the US, Israel, and Iran, and he and I
(02:08):
smoke on Tuesday morning. I want to ask you first
about the ceasefire President Trump announced last night on Truth
Social help us make sense of it? What is President
Trump trying to accomplish here?
Speaker 1 (02:19):
I think the President chiefly is trying to get himself
a foreign policy win and to make it look like
he has a greater deal of influence than he actually has.
But you have this fascinating situation where the President is
essentially conducting foreign policy by tweet and announced this ceasefire
that seemed to catch even some members of his own
(02:42):
administration off guard. He basically, via JD. Vance and Steve Witcoff,
back channeled with Israel and then got the Kataris to
pull Iran on board. And I think the bigger signal
there is that, in a lot of ways, everybody kind
of wants this thing to end. So he found a
fortuitous moment to essentially claim victory.
Speaker 2 (03:04):
We heard his frustration on Tuesday morning as he talked
to reporters before he left Washington for for a NATO summit.
Speaker 4 (03:10):
We basically have two countries that have been fighting so
long and so hard that they don't know what they're doing.
Speaker 2 (03:17):
Do you understand how fragile is this sees fire?
Speaker 3 (03:20):
Nick?
Speaker 1 (03:21):
I would say, this is a very very fragile ceasefire.
The President essentially said, you know, there's going to be
peace in the region, but I have a lot of
questions about that. What if investigators or US intelligence find
there's another site, as Iran has intimated, where it's continuing enrichment,
or what if the US finds those nine hundred pounds
(03:42):
of enriched uranium which they've lost track of, and they decide, okay,
another bunker buster bomb is needed to take out that uranium.
So there are all sorts of those elements. But then
there's the Israel component. What if Israel finds a target
of opportunity or a moment of opportunity where it can
take out another Iranian science who's involved with the nuclear program,
(04:02):
or another military general. I mean, it just feels like
there are so many ways in which this thing could unwind,
and it feels like we're very far from a situation
where we'd be able to enter into diplomacy to come
to some sort of longer term resolution.
Speaker 2 (04:16):
I want to dig into one part of that, and
it is sort of what it's going to take to
figure out how successful those strikes were. How difficult is
it going to be to assess how much material was
at those sites, how much might have been moved.
Speaker 1 (04:28):
Well, there are a couple of things. One is, in
terms of eliminating the material that Iran needs to make
a bomb, there is no assessment that currently exists to
suggest that that material has been taken off the table,
so the US has basically lost track of where that
enriched uranium is. The question is can Iran produce more?
(04:51):
And then could it produce a bomb, a weapon that
could deliver a nuclear warhead? And Iran is still seen
as being some ways away from that. So you have
assessments now saying that Iran has essentially been pushed back.
But the challenge when you look at enrichment, of course,
is that Fordoh is a facility that's buried underneath a mountain.
That's why they needed those bunker buster bombs. At the moment,
(05:14):
we're still waiting for a lot of that information to
come in.
Speaker 2 (05:17):
On Tuesday, the New York Times reported the US strikes
didn't collapse Iran's underground nuclear facilities and quote set back
Iran's nuclear program by only a few months. Former Energy
Secretary Ernest Mones spent a lot of time when he
was negotiating the Iran deal on verification how the international
community could assess what Iran was doing and what it wasn't.
(05:40):
I asked him how far away he thinks Iran is
from developing a nuclear weapon.
Speaker 3 (05:45):
When you hear these different timeframes often what you're hearing
is apples and oranges being compared. For example, when one
talks about weeks pre attack, that was correct in terms
of the time would take from where they were starting
with highly enriched uranium to reach weapons grade. For a
(06:08):
substantial number of weapons, that would have been weeks. That's
not the same as you often hear as building a
nuclear weapon, So then you hear some say, well, it's
three years away. I think that's a little bit on
the high side in the sense that there are many
intermediate places you can go in building much cruder weapons,
(06:31):
which are nevertheless would make for a very very bad
day if one were to explode.
Speaker 2 (06:37):
I saw that Anthony Blincoln, who was President Biden's Secretary
of State and someone with whom you worked in the
Obama administration, had a piece in The Times on Tuesday,
and he called the strikes on Iran by the US
and Israel unwise and unnecessary. But he added that now
that it's done, I very much hope it succeeded. Do
you feel similarly about what's transpired here over the last
few days.
Speaker 3 (06:56):
Well, first of all, I think there's no question that
militarily it was a success. Whether success means FODOH was
badly damaged or obliterated, I think remains to be seen,
but clearly lots of damage to that facility and also
to the Matan's enrichment facility. However, I would distinguish damage
of facilities with curtailment of a possible nuclear weapons.
Speaker 2 (07:21):
Program, looking at how much damage has been done, how
much time and effort is that going to take.
Speaker 3 (07:25):
It's likely that we'll never really quite know the exact
level of damage, but I don't think it matters that
much to me. It's going to be much more now
what they elect to do or not do in covert sites.
Before the US bombing, Iran made the statement that they
had a third undisclosed location. I'd have no idea if
(07:48):
that's true or not, but I wouldn't rule it out.
And when you combine that with the enriched geranium that
was probably moved and hidden, and you combine that with
their extensive work on other elements of a nuclear weapon
up until two thousand and three, I don't think we
should doubt that they had the capability of building a
(08:10):
nuclear weapons, certainly a crude one, in a reasonably prompt time.
Speaker 2 (08:15):
How difficult is it to move nuclear materials around. So
if an advance of these attacks, Aroon wanted to move
some of that uranium, how hard an undertaking is that?
Speaker 3 (08:24):
That would be simple. It's just cylinders filled with a
gaseous form uranium hexafluoride to be precise, in basically metal tanks,
and you can just load them onto a truck and
move them. We may not ever know how much of
that highly enriched uranium escaped the bombing. If I were
(08:46):
a military planner, I would be assuming all of it
was moved.
Speaker 2 (08:51):
After the break? What could bring Iran back to the
negotiating table after a blistering few weeks of fighting in
the Middle East? On Tuesday, after President Trump announced a
ceasefire between Israel and Iran, I sat down separately with
(09:15):
former Energy Secretary Ernest Monees and with Nick Wadhams, who
oversees Bloomberg's coverage of national security. We've heard from the President,
we have read his post on social media. What don't
we know about what he wants to happen next? Is
it direct talks? It seems like it is a return
to diplomacy in some form.
Speaker 1 (09:34):
I mean, that is the great question that we have
all been trying to answer because it has felt for
a long time like the President is not actually interested
in the sort of diplomacy that would lead to an
ironclad agreement. I mean, people think of the Joint Comprehensive
Plan of Action, the previous nuclear deal that was done
under the Obama administration that took more than two years.
(09:57):
The President this time essentially said a month to go, Hey, Roan,
you've got sixty days. Come to a deal in sixty days.
And they had these periodic conversations between Steve Whitcoff, his envoy,
and Iranian officials, but there's never been a sense that
they were actually sitting in a room and hammering out
the concrete and difficult details that would produce a lasting agreement.
Speaker 2 (10:20):
Ernest Monies was one of the lead negotiators the JCPOA,
working in parallel with President Obama's Secretary of State John Carey.
Speaker 3 (10:28):
My job was to make sure that the way President
Obama expressed it was that if they were to go
all out with what they had to produce the material
for one nuclear weapon, it would credibly take a year
or longer. So that was one requirement. The second requirement
(10:50):
was to come back with very stringent verification and transparency approaches,
and we did. We came back with unparalleled verification measures.
Speaker 2 (11:02):
But the deal Monies and his colleagues worked on didn't
survive Trump's first term. He withdrew the US from the
agreement in twenty eighteen.
Speaker 4 (11:10):
As I have said many times, the Iran deal was
one of the worst and most one sided transactions the
United States has ever entered into.
Speaker 2 (11:21):
Nick has he said anything in the intervening years intervening
period to give us an indication of what he wants
in an agreement with Iran That wasn't there in that
first one.
Speaker 1 (11:31):
Right, So, the whole premise of the JCPOA was you
put these limits on Iranian enrichment. You don't completely remove
their ability to enrich uranium. You just put it so
that they can't enrich to weapons grade. And then you
essentially put in a time limit, you say about fifteen years,
and then after that they would reassess. And the deal
was very explicit in not putting limits on Iran's ballistic
(11:55):
missile program, on its funding for proxy groups in the region,
on all the concerns that US and European officials had.
But the idea was Okay, let's sort of fold Iran
back into the international community. Let's build goodwill, let's get
its economy humming, give it an incentive to essentially stay
on the path, on the straight and narrow, and then
(12:16):
in fifteen years we'll all come back and reassess and
put new limits on and there will be this unified
front with Russia and China and all the other signatories
to the deal. So the President in twenty eighteen basically
looked the deal and said, well, this only puts very
time constrained limits on Iranian ye Richmond, but doesn't require
anything else, any other limits that are the reason why
(12:38):
Iran is also such a threat to the region. So
he blew it up. And then subsequently the Trump administration
had an envoy, Brian Hook who went in and tried
to come to a new deal to impose more strict sunsets,
to put more limits on the Iranian program, and he
was unable to do that, in part because Trump wouldn't
sign off on it.
Speaker 2 (12:57):
The US was talking with Iran again during President Trump's
second term, but Iran called off those talks after the
Israeli strikes. Nick, where do you see things going from here?
I go back to the last time Iran in the
United States were negotiating a deal, and it seemed like
Iran had more optionality. And I look at the state
of Iran, its economy under sanctions, the fact that it's
(13:18):
been hit by these strikes from Israel and the US,
its proxies in the Middle East have been diminished.
Speaker 1 (13:23):
You know, it's like a fascinating puzzle piece, because you're right,
Iran has been severely weakened. It seems that it does
not have the hand that it had back then to
play anymore. And that's what President Trump is essentially counting.
On the flip side, is that what you had in
twenty fifteen when those conversations were going on was at
(13:45):
least some element of trust that if you came to
this deal, the two sides would adhere to it. And
then once President Trump came in and blew up that deal,
you essentially gave the hardliners in Iran all the evidence
they needed to say, Hey, the Americans can never be trusted.
Why would we ever get into a deal with them?
Speaker 3 (14:05):
And that was what.
Speaker 1 (14:06):
Actually hung up the negotiations from the Biden administration with Iran.
So you have this situation where On the one hand,
Iran is severely weakened and does have an incentive to
get into a deal. But also the hardliners in Iran
who oppose that idea have all the evidence they need
to show that the US can't be trusted. And then
(14:26):
you also have plenty of examples for Iran countries like Russia,
North Korea, even Cuba where they've been under massive economic
sanction for many, many years, and in some ways the
regime is only more powerful than it ever was. So
there is an incentive structure for the leadership in Iran
to say, let's just hang on and keep up this
(14:48):
opposition with the West.
Speaker 2 (14:49):
I asked ernest Monies, what would or could incentivize Iran
to pursue a diplomatic solution Again.
Speaker 3 (14:56):
To come back to the table, I think we have
to look at what are the strategic needs of all
the players in this What does everybody need out of
a negotiation. Well, what Iran says they need is the
ability to use nuclear technology peacefully. They want nuclear electricity, fine,
(15:17):
they like medical isotopes, cure cancer and the like. Fine,
we have no problem with those peaceful uses. What the
West will need and Israel will need is considerable confidence
that Iran is not engaging, especially in a covert program
(15:37):
to build a nuclear weapon. I for one, think that
an interesting approach to a new negotiation, and I have
reason to believe Iran would be interested in pursuing a
regional development of nuclear energy and its supply chain that
would include enrichment and fuel fabrication, potentially in various countries
(16:00):
in the region, but not under any one country's control.
So again, providing some assurance that there will not be
a diversion of materials or technology to a weapons program.
Speaker 2 (16:12):
Lastly, I want to ask you about the key ingredient
to any successful negotiation, and that, of course is trust.
Is it possible, after all that's happened, for these two
countries to get together in a room and for the
US and Iran to trust one another enough to engage
in vilent negotiations.
Speaker 3 (16:30):
Well, you know, in twenty fifteen, when we were negotiating
the original Iran deal, my phrase was always don't trust
and verify, and I think that's going to be the
approach here on all sides. So again I go back
to those strategic objectives Iran being able to use nuclear
technology peacefully, the West and Israel and other countries being
(16:53):
confident that if they were to try a covert program,
at least the bar would be set very very high
for detection, and that Iran and other countries in the
region feel that they have security of supply to pursue
peaceful uses. So I think those are the three objectives.
They will not be based upon trust, They will have
(17:15):
to be based upon verification and on processes in which
Iran also feels confident that they will have access to
what they need.
Speaker 2 (17:30):
This is The Big Take from Bloomberg News. I'm David Gera.
To get more from The Big Take and unlimited access
to all of Bloomberg dot com, subscribe today at Bloomberg
dot com slash podcast offer. If you like this episode,
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Thanks for listening. We'll be back tomorrow.
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Sarah Holder
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