What to expect at upcoming US-Iran talks in Oman
US President Donald Trump's private appeal to Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei - while publicly threatening all-out war - may now be paying off.
For the first time since a brief attempt in 2021 under former president Joe Biden, the US and Iran will be engaging in supposedly "indirect" talks that could quickly become "direct", depending on whose narrative you accept.
Iran's foreign minister, Seyed Abbas Araghchi, will lead a delegation to meet Trump's special envoy to the Middle East, Steve Witkoff, in Oman.
Araghchi's presence is considered very high-level, and therefore, "direct", but the Iranians have refused to use that term. Witkoff may be Trump's go-to for the world's biggest crises (amusingly dubbed the "envoy to everything" in Washington) but he is not a cabinet-level official.
Oman is a largely neutral country that practices quiet diplomacy in the Arabian Gulf and has a record of facilitating sensitive talks for western powers.
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Iran had previously said it would negotiate nothing while under the "maximum pressure" campaign imposed by the Trump administration. Indeed, the administration is levying new sanctions on Iran-affiliated entities nearly every week, if not more frequently.
But Trump said he was hesitant to sign the maximum pressure memo and has very much indicated he wants to cut his own deal, one with his name on it.
On the other hand, the Iranians “have an opportunity to get a mutually beneficial deal”, Ryan Costello, policy director for the National Iranian American Council (NIAC), told Middle East Eye.
"Iran has, I think, taken pains across the years to signal that they won't be threatened into anything," he added.
"But you look at the totality of what happened under [Trump's first term], Iran didn't actually have all that many great cards to play, and the Iranian economy took a lot of damage... So I think Iran probably is looking to preserve as much options as it possibly can."
While Trump has repeatedly said his sole requirement is that Iran never obtain a nuclear weapon, his press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters on Friday that "all options are on the table".
"You can agree to President Trump’s demand, or there will be all hell to pay," she said.
Long-term outcomes
The Trump administration has been careful not to publicly take the military option off the table while emphasising that they prefer negotiations.
"If the question is whether the US can bomb Iranian nuclear facilities, oh yes, absolutely, they can," Sina Azodi, an expert on Iran's nuclear programme at George Washington University, said on a virtual discussion panel on Friday.
"But in the game of chess, the other side always gets a turn too. So Iranians can always rebuild everything that they have. They have the institutional knowledge, they have the industrial capacity to rebuild everything."
And that may be why Witkoff has previously spoken more about "verification" measures in terms of Iran's nuclear programme, rather than adopting a maximalist approach, which would drive Tehran away and likely escalate tensions between the two countries.
Iran is currently enriching uranium to the 60 percent threshold, just short of weapons grade, including by using advanced centrifuge designs at the deeply-buried Fordow enrichment facility, a NIAC fact sheet showed.
The programme is not housed at a single facility but "dispersed across Iran, with the most sensitive operations taking place at deeply buried facilities that are difficult to destroy".
With Iran in such a position, it will have a list of demands, the chief of which is access to its restricted assets abroad for its oil exports in recent years. The US can grant it control over its frozen funds.
Tehran will also want to conduct trade with western governments, including the US, a major draw for Trump. Any such transactions are currently blocked by US sanctions on its oil and finance sectors.
NIAC has pointed out that "no US taxpayer money would be sent to Iran under any conceivable scenario".
'Trillion-dollar opportunity'
Three days after Trump made the surprise announcement about the Saturday talks, Iran's foreign minister penned an opinion article for The Washington Post that appealed to the core of foreign policymaking under the Trump administration.
"Many in Washington portray Iran as a closed country from an economic point of view. The truth is that we are open to welcoming businesses from around the world," Araghchi wrote. "It is the US administrations and congressional impediments, not Iran, that have kept American enterprises away from the trillion-dollar opportunity that access to our economy represents."
"To say that the scope for trade and investment in Iran is unparalleled is an understatement," he added.
Araghchi was speaking Trump's language, and the billionaire real-estate mogul made no secret of it in the past.
Nine years ago, on the campaign trail for his first presidential bid, Trump expressed his ire at the Obama-negotiated 2015 Iran nuclear deal, formally called the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), for not removing the primary sanctions placed on Iran which would allow it to do business with US companies, and more specifically, purchase US weapons.
The JCPOA placed significant restrictions on Iran’s nuclear programme in exchange for secondary sanctions relief, which allowed Iran to significantly increase its global oil exports.
"Trump was saying this means that European and Russian and Chinese companies will be able to go in and make money in Iran, but American companies will be kept out," Trita Parsi, executive vice president at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, said on a virtual panel discussion on Friday.
One carve-out in the JCPOA allowed Tehran to cut a deal to purchase 80 US-made Boeing planes.
But then-president Barack Obama "did not want to be accused of trying to use [the deal] for economic purposes", Parsi said.
"And of course, there was a hard red line from the Iranian conservatives at the time who feared that an American entry into the Iranian market would also entail American influence inside of Iran and that that would eventually erode their own control," he added.
Now, with the green light from Khamenei, Iran appears to be open to at least limited investment.
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