US and Iran make ‘progress’ in nuclear talks, mediator says
Your guide to what Trump’s second term means for Washington, business and the world
The US and Iran have made “significant progress” in talks over Tehran’s nuclear programme and will meet again, Oman’s foreign minister said at the conclusion of day-long negotiations between the two arch-foes in Geneva.
Oman’s Badr Albusaidi, who was mediating the discussions between US envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner and Iran’s foreign minister Abbas Araghchi, said on Thursday evening that talks would “resume soon after consultation in the respective capitals”.
“We have finished the day after significant progress,” Albusaidi said on X.
The negotiations come after repeated threats by US President Donald Trump to launch military strikes against Iran if it does not make a deal to curb its nuclear programme.
Araghchi said after Thursday’s talks that “good progress” had been made following what he described as “one of the best, most serious and longest rounds of negotiations” with the US.
“Positions have drawn closer to a mutual understanding in some areas,” he added. “We made good progress on the nuclear case and the lifting of sanctions.”
Tehran regards the lifting of US sanctions as essential for any sustainable and mutually acceptable deal.
Rafael Grossi, chief of the International Atomic Energy Agency, participated in “consultations” over Iran’s nuclear programme in Geneva, Oman’s foreign ministry said.
Araghchi said technical teams would start expert-level discussions at the UN atomic watchdog in Vienna on Monday, which would be followed by another round of negotiations between Tehran and Washington in about a week.
The White House declined to comment.
Iran’s nuclear enrichment goals have been a longstanding barrier to progress towards a deal. Witkoff said over the weekend that “zero enrichment” was a Trump administration “red line”.
Iran has consistently rejected the condition, saying it has the right to enrich uranium for civil nuclear use as a signatory to a non-proliferation treaty. Caving to the demand is considered a red line for Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the country’s supreme leader.
Tehran has also bristled at US demands that negotiations simultaneously address Iran’s ballistic missiles — which it has used to retaliate against Israel and US military assets and allies in the region — and its support for militant groups such as Lebanon’s Hizbollah.
US secretary of state Marco Rubio had said on Wednesday that talks would be “largely focused on the nuclear programme”. But he criticised Tehran for refusing “to talk about [its] ballistic missiles to us or to anyone . . . That’s a big problem”.
The Islamic republic had “thousands of short-range ballistic missiles” that threatened US forces and its bases and partners in the region, Rubio added. Tehran also had naval assets that “threaten shipping and try to threaten the US Navy” and conventional weapons that were “designed to attack the US”, he said.
US officials have made conflicting claims about the threat posed by Iran’s nuclear programme.
Rubio’s comments came a day after Trump accused Tehran of harbouring “sinister” intentions by actively seeking a nuclear weapon. And Witkoff last week claimed Iran was “probably a week away from having industrial-grade bomb-making material”.
Rubio later said Iran was, in fact, “not enriching [uranium] right now” but it wants to, he added.
“The fact that they insist, not just on enrichment, but on enrichment and locations located inside of mountains . . . you would have to lack common sense to not know what that means, or what that could mean,” Rubio said.
Trump last year claimed to have “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear programme when the US briefly joined Israel’s 12-day war against the Islamic republic.
The US president has said repeatedly that he would prefer a diplomatic solution with Iran, but has threatened to use force if Tehran does not make a deal.
The US has in recent weeks amassed the largest naval force in the Middle East since its 2003 invasion of Iraq.
Rubio said ahead of Thursday’s talks that if the two countries could not “even make progress on the nuclear programme, it’s going to be hard to make progress on the ballistic missiles as well”.
Experts have struggled to assess the size of Iran’s ballistic missile arsenal in the wake of the 12-day war last year. Iran fired more than 500 medium- to long-range missiles at Israel during the conflict, and many more were destroyed by Israeli strikes.
They said it was plausible that Iran’s short-range ballistic missile arsenal is still in the thousands, however, as few were used in the war. The missiles cannot reach the continental US.
Danny Citrinowicz, an Iran expert at the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv, said Tehran’s missile and drone arsenal is “designed to compensate for conventional military weakness and to deter its primary adversaries, meaning the US and Israel.”
Lynette Nusbacher, a former senior intelligence adviser on the Middle East to the UK cabinet, said Iran’s ballistic missiles “can definitely be shot at US bases in the Persian Gulf” and that Tehran also has “anti-ship cruise missiles on fast attack craft”.
Congressional Democrats and some Republicans, including fierce critics of the Iranian regime, have questioned the Trump administration’s shifting rationales for military action.
House and Senate Democrats plan to force a vote next week on a bipartisan resolution aimed at blocking Trump from going to war in Iran without congressional approval.
Iran has threatened to escalate any conflict with the US. A regime insider in Tehran told the FT that Iran had changed its strategy to one designed to impose tangible costs on US forces and assets if conflict erupted.
Additional reporting by Neri Zilber in Tel Aviv; cartography by Steven Bernard
Comments