How to Solve the Iran Problem

Opinion|How to Solve the Iran Problem

President Trump said on Monday that he will “solve the Iran problem” and that “it’s almost an easy one.”

Almost.

What is “the Iran problem”? Trump seems to think it’s Iran’s efforts to obtain nuclear weapons, which, he has said, “they can’t have.” Iran has enriched uranium to 60 percent purity — close to weapons grade — and “might be able to enrich enough uranium for five fission weapons within about one week and enough for eight weapons in less than two weeks,” according to the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control. It would take additional time to make the parts needed to turn this fissile material into a bomb, but this could be done in small, secret facilities.

Steve Witkoff, Trump’s emissary, said last week that the administration’s red line was “weaponization” of Iran’s nuclear capabilities. Incredibly, that conceded more to Tehran than Barack Obama’s 2015 nuclear deal — the one Trump correctly canceled in his first term for being too weak. After meeting with Iran’s foreign minister over the weekend, Witkoff appeared to walk back his original suggestion, posting on X on Tuesday that Iran must “eliminate its nuclear enrichment and weaponization program.”

Tehran has been playing Western diplomats for fools for decades — including through Obama’s much-ballyhooed Iran deal. That deal’s nuclear restrictions, had they remained in place, would soon be expiring; mostly, what the deal accomplished was to expand Iran’s regional power by lifting economic sanctions. Iran also has a richly documented record of cheating on its agreements, a fact that was exposed by Israel when it stole the regime’s nuclear secrets from a warehouse in Iran in 2018.

If Witkoff really thinks there’s any kind of inspection or verification process that will keep the regime in check, he’s naïve. But the larger mistake is to think that the Iran problem is fundamentally about nuclear weapons. France and Britain also have nukes, but not many people lie awake at night worried about them. The Iranian regime is different not because it might acquire nuclear weapons. It’s different because its ideological character, geopolitical ambitions and raging anti-Americanism and antisemitism, as well as its long record of supporting terrorism, might dispose the regime to brandish or even use them.

That’s what must change if the nuclear question is going to be fully resolved. Which brings us to something else Trump has said of Iran: “I want them to be a rich, great nation.” Good. The question is how.