In recent decades, Iran’s nuclear program has been a concern for the international community, and the United States has a history of negotiation attempts to contain that program. In 2015, the Obama administration and other major nations negotiated the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), limiting Iran’s nuclear enrichment program in exchange for fewer sanctions. Then the first Trump administration withdrew the United States from the pact.
Within the first six months of the second Trump administration, the president ordered the bombing of three nuclear sites in Iran despite U.S. intelligence that Iran had not decided to build nuclear weapons with its growing stock of highly enriched uranium. After the attacks, Trump said, “Our objective was the destruction of Iran’s nuclear enrichment capacity and a stop to the nuclear threat posed by the world’s number one state sponsor of terror.”
To better understand this complicated relationship, the role of diplomacy, and how negotiations are structured, we spoke with Jake Sullivan, the Kissinger Professor of the Practice of Statecraft and World Order at ĚÇĐÄvlogąŮÍř. Sullivan was President Biden's national security advisor from January 2021 to January 2025. In the Obama administration, he served as national security advisor to then-Vice President Biden, director of the Policy Planning Staff at the U.S. Department of State, and deputy chief of staff to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
The discussion below has been lightly edited for concision and clarity.
Q: What is your history with Iran?
Sullivan: This is an issue I’ve spent a lot of time on as a practitioner over the course of the past decade.
I was involved in negotiations with Iran going back to 2012 when President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton asked me to go to Oman to meet for the first time in secret with representatives of the Iranian regime to talk about a nuclear deal.
Over the course of 2012 and into 2014, we engaged in a set of secret negotiations that ultimately paved the way for the JCPOA, the Iran nuclear deal that President Obama announced to the world in 2015.
I then served as national security advisor and spent over four years managing Iran policy from the White House across the entire government, including the diplomatic elements, the sanctions, and the steps we took to deter Iran’s destabilizing activities.
Q: How are these negotiations structured? What are the steps?
Sullivan: Nuclear negotiations are particularly challenging because they are both highly political, meaning they involve issues that require political leadership on each side to contend with, and they’re highly technical because they involve an understanding of the nuclear fuel cycle of how verification works, how nuclear stockpiles work, how centrifuges work. And, you have to keep your eyes on the big picture.
Q: What is the big picture behind the negotiations?
Sullivan: For the United States and our partners, we were driving to put Iran’s nuclear program in a box so they could never break out to build a nuclear weapon.
Iran was trying to retain some semblance of a civilian nuclear capacity, and cynics would say also trying to retain some capability if in the future they ever wanted to break out.
So, each side had its objectives going into negotiations.
Then you bring in teams of experts: nuclear experts, experts on how the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) actually does verification and auditing of commitments, experts in law who could tell you how each word in the JCPOA could be interpreted or misinterpreted or twisted.
And then the last point is it wasn’t just the U.S. and Iran who were involved in all this negotiating. There were several other countries involved as well, including some of our closest allies like the U.K. and France and Germany. At various points, it even involved some of our fiercest competitors and adversaries in China and Russia. Of course, the Iranians themselves were quite a challenge to deal with directly.
Q: How does the United States conduct negotiations with a country it has a difficult relationship with, such as Iran?
Sullivan: For a significant period, the U.S. and Iran had no real method of engaging directly. Obviously, we have an incredibly fraught relationship with them. We don’t have formal diplomatic relations. There is no American ambassador in Tehran. There’s no Iranian ambassador in the United States.
We negotiated for many years through third parties or through passing paper back and forth, which is not the most efficient way to negotiate.
Starting in 2012, President Obama decided we needed a direct channel. The most effective way to make progress was to do it entirely in secret, to keep it hidden from the press and from the world and try to sit directly across the table from our Iranian counterparts and negotiate the broad framework of a nuclear deal. But we also recognized it couldn’t stay secret forever as this agreement had to be presented to allies and partners and the world.
After we held secret negotiations, we then transitioned into open public negotiations led by Wendy Sherman [current ĚÇĐÄvlogąŮÍř senior fellow who served as a diplomat and negotiator], who ran, I would say a multi-ring circus, not just on behalf of the United States but on behalf of the members of the Security Council plus Germany plus the European Union, all of whom were engaged in this process.
That public negotiation required some combination of big plenary meeting rooms with lots of people talking and getting their options across and then very quiet side discussions often just between the U.S. and Iran to hammer out the details.
Q: What do you feel President Trump wants out of negotiations?
Sullivan: I think what President Trump was looking for when he came into office was a deal that he could say was better than the JCPOA, and beyond that, I think he didn’t have really strong convictions about the terms of that deal.
As president, he has moved to a much more hardline position: the complete dismantlement of Iran’s nuclear program.
Under the Iran nuclear deal that President Obama negotiated, Iran retained a limited nuclear capacity to be used for civilian purposes with intense long-term verification.
President Trump was basically saying, Iran can have no nuclear capacity of any kind. When it comes to the core activity of a nuclear program—the enrichment of uranium—all enrichment of uranium would have to be done outside of Iran.
Iran has resisted that position, has said it has rights under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty to enrich uranium, and that it should be able to do so under constraints and under monitoring and verification, but it should be permitted to do so.
The president said no, and that created some degree of gridlock or standoff between the Iranian side and the American side. It was into that standoff that Prime Minister Netanyahu and the Israelis stepped in and said, “We should just take care of this militarily.” Even as the negotiations were continuing, the Israeli side convinced President Trump that it was no longer worth it to wait around: Iran’s not going to budge on these hardline demands, and we should take out their program through military action.
Q: Where do we stand now?
Sullivan: The great question in foreign policy is always, “OK, so then what?” You can ask that after any action that an administration takes. We’ve seen this military action by both Israel and the United States, and the question remains, “OK, so then what?”
Iran seems to have retained some amount of enriched uranium stockpile, some centrifuges that it could assemble so that it could get back to the business of constructing a nuclear program and go for a nuke.
Critically, right now Iran is not allowing IAEA inspectors to look at its nuclear program.
The way that we monitor and verify and confirm what exactly is happening with Iran’s nuclear program is with those inspectors on the ground, not just human eyes and ears, but cameras and technical means to see what’s going on with the enriched uranium, what’s going on with the centrifuges, what’s going on with these various facilities.
That’s the state of play today.
If I told you I've reached a deal with Iran, but I’m not exactly sure what’s happened with its enriched uranium, what’s happened with all its centrifuges, and there are no inspectors currently inspecting, you would say that the deal's not tight enough.
So, if we apply the same standard that we apply to a deal to military action, there’s unfinished business here regarding how to fully and sustainably verify that Iran’s nuclear program is being monitored continuously to be sure it remains in a box and Iran can never break out to get a nuclear weapon.
In my view, the best way to do that is diplomacy. But is President Trump prepared to go back to the table in a serious way? He seems to indicate at points that he is. And then is Iran prepared to come to the table given that they’ve just been bombed, even though they were previously at the table?
The answer to that question is as yet unclear, but my firm conviction is that if you want a long-term solution to the Iranian nuclear program, one that really sticks over time, you need a deal because military action can set their nuclear program back but not nearly as long as a deal can.
And if you don’t have a deal that follows military action, then you’re basically left with threatening and potentially using military force repeatedly over months and years, and that is a highly uncertain and unstable situation.
Q: One of the justifications for this action from the Trump administration is that this is about keeping Americans safe. Do you feel this has made everyone safer, or are we at more risk because of these actions?
Sullivan: We are only partway through the story. If it stopped here, if we did nothing further, then it’s hard for me to see how we are considerably safer because Iran retains the capacity and the know-how and now has even greater incentive and impetus to at least consider going for it. And there is always the possibility of an element of rage and revenge that could have a very long tail, maybe not immediate retaliation, but some retaliation over time.
But on the other hand, if the administration follows up these strikes with an aggressive effort and real diplomacy to get a real deal in place, one that actually locks Iran’s nuclear program down for the long term with verification and inspection, then that could leave us in a better position.
It depends on the next steps that the administration chooses to take, and I hope that what they choose to do is pursue a diplomatic path and go for a credible deal, and the world rallies to put as much pressure on Iran as possible to take that deal.
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Banner photograph by Carlos Barria/Pool/AFP/Getty Images; inline image by Martha Stewart.