Australia/Israel Review

Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu travelled to Washington on April 7 to try to mitigate the blow from US President Donald Trump’s newly announced ‘Liberation Day’ tariffs – a sweeping 17% duty slapped on Israeli goods and products. Netanyahu found no satisfaction in Washington on that count, but worse was yet to come. Sitting beside Netanyahu at a joint press conference, Trump dropped a diplomatic bombshell by announcing that the United States would begin direct nuclear talks with Iran within the week.

Netanyahu was visibly startled, and Israeli officials later admitted the timing of the move had caught Jerusalem off guard, although it knew that talks were a possibility. Moreover, as the New York Times reported on April 17, Trump in fact blocked an Israeli plan to attack Iran in May – a scenario that could only succeed with US assistance during the attack and to help defend Israel from Iranian retaliation afterwards.

After meeting Trump, Netanyahu appeared to acknowledge the diplomatic option in the press conference when he said: “If it can be done diplomatically in a full way, the way that it was done in Libya, I think that would be a good thing. But whatever happens, we have to make sure that Iran does not have nuclear weapons.”

Trump then interjected with the announcement that talks were forthcoming. 

Those talks began on April 12 in Oman, led by US envoy Steve Witkoff – who is also juggling the Gaza hostage negotiations and attempts to end the war between Russia and Ukraine – and Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi. 

Witkoff told Fox News after the Oman talks that negotiations would revolve around verification mechanisms for uranium enrichment and missile capabilities, including “the trigger for a bomb.”

In that interview, he emphasised caps to uranium enrichment – potentially around 3.67%, the level of enrichment typically used in civilian nuclear power – rather than the complete dismantling of Iran’s program, as was done in Libya in 2003. But the following day, he reversed course, declaring that any deal would only be acceptable if it included the total elimination of Iran’s enrichment and weaponisation capabilities. “A deal with Iran will only be completed if it is a Trump deal,” he wrote on X. “Any final arrangement must set a framework for peace, stability, and prosperity in the Middle East.”

Iran has currently stockpiled enough uranium enriched to 60% – technically a very short distance from military grade enriched uranium, typically 93% – to produce the fissile material for several nuclear weapons within as little as ten days if and when it decides to take such a step. However, it would still need to master weaponisation and delivery vehicles to launch a nuclear-armed missile. It is unclear how much progress Iran has made on these technical tasks – which are easy to conceal from international inspectors – but most experts estimate they would take between six months to a year after the decision to build nuclear weapons was taken. 

Shortly after the talks in Oman, Trump held a call with that country’s Sultan and thanked him for hosting them. The White House emphasised that the President remains committed to preventing Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon, but did not clarify whether this meant zero enrichment or a willingness to accept a controlled, monitored enrichment program, as Witkoff implied in his initial post-talks comments.

The ambiguity has unnerved Israeli officials. “The main concern is that we don’t know what his red lines are,” one said. “Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu himself doesn’t really know.”

Indeed, there are reportedly competing voices in the White House on these questions: One camp, unofficially led by Vice President JD Vance, sees diplomacy, including a US willingness to compromise on enrichment, as both viable and desirable. Axios quoted a US official involved in the process as saying that Vance has taken an active role in Iran policy discussions, advocating compromise to push a deal through. He is reportedly backed by Witkoff, as well as Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth. This camp argues that the only alternative, a strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities, would endanger American troops in the region and likely send oil prices soaring.

But a more hawkish camp – spearheaded by National Security Adviser Mike Waltz and Secretary of State Marco Rubio – is reported to view any deal short of total dismantlement as naïve. Senators close to Trump, including Lindsey Graham and Tom Cotton, are also vocal advocates of this view, arguing that Iran’s regime is at its weakest in years and should be forced to capitulate, not offered compromises. 

They’re joined by outside influencers such as Mark Dubowitz, the Iran nuclear expert at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. “The president once called the 2015 Obama deal fatally flawed,” Dubowitz told Axios. “The question now is whether he still believes it.” For this camp, the only acceptable outcomes are either an American-led military strike, a green light for Israel to act with US support or a deal that completely prohibits Iran undertaking any uranium enrichment or plutonium production domestically.

Other than extolling the benefits of such a Libya-style deal, Israeli officials have remained relatively muted regarding the talks. 

Netanyahu has avoided directly referencing them publicly, instead replying to a statement posted by Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei titled ‘Why the Zionist regime must be eliminated from the region,’ noting that this was happening while Iran was “supposedly negotiating peace with the United States.”

“Well, Israel will NOT be eliminated,” Netanyahu said in a video posted to X. “What must be eliminated is Iran’s axis of terror and its nuclear weapons program. Not only for the sake of Israel, but for the sake of our entire region, and for the sake of peace in our world,” he concluded.

Former PM Naftali Bennett, who recently registered a new political party and is possibly seeking a comeback, was more vocal. “The only deal worth making with Iran is one that: 1. Fully and permanently dismantles its nuclear program. 2. Ends all export of Iranian terrorism. 3. Fully stops ballistic missile development,” Bennett wrote on X.

Meanwhile, Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS) President David Albright, a former senior International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) nuclear inspector, told the Jerusalem Post that unless Iranian concessions go substantially beyond the 2015 JCPOA agreement – which Trump withdrew from in 2018, during his first term, calling it a “horrible” deal – the US should ramp up its maximum pressure campaign. 

“If the regime refuses to make these concessions, then it makes sense to carry out targeted destruction of key nuclear assets and capabilities, and perhaps certain leaders – with a threat to destroy far more, such as economic targets and leadership – if the regime moves to rebuild its nuclear sites or starts to build a nuclear weapon,” Albright said.

That sentiment was music to Israeli ears. 

Iran, meanwhile, has rejected outright any talk of ending uranium enrichment. “The principle of enrichment is not subject to negotiation,” Araghchi said, calling on Washington to adopt a “more constructive approach” and warning that if it continues with “contradictory and conflicting positions, we will face difficulties.” 

A further round of talks took place between Witkoff and Araghchi in Rome on April 19. Araghchi claimed of the meeting, “It was agreed that negotiations will continue and move into the next phase, in which expert-level meetings will begin… in Oman. The experts will have the opportunity to start designing a framework for an agreement.” The Iranians also claimed that the Americans had not raised non-nuclear issues, such as missiles or support for terrorist proxies, during the talks, as Israeli leaders would have hoped they would.

While the US did not confirm these Iranian claims, the worst-case scenario for Israel is plain to see: the prospect of a diplomatic agreement that does not restrain Iran much more than the JCPOA did, but is framed by Trump as a better deal. That outcome would leave Israel in a difficult position, unsatisfied with a deal and most likely unwilling to anger the Trump Administration by going on its own militarily, and possibly even having its hands tied with regard to covert actions against the nuclear program.

Israel’s other fear is that the Iranians can successfully spin out the talks to play for time, as they have in past negotiations with the US – with long talks on a “framework” before proceeding to detailed discussions on the specific wording of an actual agreement – and thus reverse the setbacks they have suffered over the past year in terms of both regional allies and national air defences, making any potential military strike much more difficult and costly. 

Meanwhile, Albright’s ISIS warned on April 8 that Iran’s nuclear threat has reached a level of “Extreme Danger”, citing its accelerated weaponisation capabilities and refusal to cooperate with international inspectors. And while the Institute didn’t explicitly say so, other experts have noted that more and more senior figures within the Iranian regime have recently been publicly arguing that now is the time to build nuclear weapons to protect the regime from external threats. 

Without either a rapid diplomatic breakthrough or a US or Israeli-led military strike, the risk of a sudden Iranian dash toward nuclear weapons is alarmingly real. What’s more, given the very limited access of IAEA inspectors to Iranian facilities, there is no guarantee the world could detect such a dash in time to do anything about it.