Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian said on Sunday that he viewed recent talks with the United States as “a step forward,” but his foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, insisted on the same day that Iran will never give up its uranium enrichment program.
Araghchi held talks with U.S. envoy Steve Witkoff in Oman on Friday, after a few days of last-minute demands from Tehran that looked like an effort to scuttle the event. Based on the news emerging from Oman, Araghchi and Witkoff seemed to accomplish little more than agreeing to hold more meetings in the future.
Pezeshkian wrote a post on social media platform X on Sunday that portrayed the Araghchi-Witkoff meeting as “step forward,” at least symbolically.
“Dialogue has always been our strategy for peaceful resolution. Our logic on the nuclear issue is the explicit rights in the Non-Proliferation Treaty,” he wrote.
Pezeshkian insisted Tehran “has always responded to respect with respect, but will not tolerate the language of force” – a declaration that would come as a surprise to the thousands of Iranians slaughtered by his regime over the past few weeks to suppress dissent, were they alive to hear it.
Araghchi was more pessimistic at a forum in Tehran on Sunday, defiantly insisting that “zero enrichment” of uranium “can never be accepted by us.”
“Hence, we need to focus on discussions that accept enrichment inside Iran while building trust that enrichment is and will stay for peaceful purposes,” he said.
“Iran’s insistence on enrichment is not merely technical or economic,” he pontificated. “It is rooted in a desire for independence and dignity. No one has the right to tell the Iranian nation what it should, or should not, have.”
“Washington’s continuation of sanctions on Iran and its recent military deployments raise doubts about the other party’s seriousness and readiness to engage in genuine negotiations. We are closely monitoring the situation, assessing all the signals, and will decide whether to continue the negotiations,” he said.
Araghchi told Al Jazeera News in an interview on Saturday that Iran’s missile program was “never negotiable,” which ruled out the other subject that could have been on the table at further negotiations. He also ruled out discussions of Iran’s terrorist proxies across the Middle East, or his regime’s murderous abuse of its own people to put down protests.
U.S. Vice President JD Vance countered during a trip to Armenia on Monday that “if there are red lines in the talks with Iran, Trump will be the one to set them.”
“He wants a meaningful deal. Reaching an agreement with Iran would benefit everyone,” Vance said.
President Donald Trump said on Friday he felt the talks in Oman were “very good,” but he had a rather different definition of goodness than Araghchi or Pezeshkian.
“Iran looks like it wants to make a deal very badly. We’ll have to see what that deal is. But I think Iran looks like they want to make a deal very badly, as they should. Last time they decided maybe not to do it, but I think they probably feel differently,” Trump said.
On Saturday, the Jerusalem Post reported that the Trump administration has signaled Araghchi that he needs to arrive at the next meeting with “meaningful substance” to offer.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who will travel to Washington for a meeting with President Trump at the White House on Wednesday, told his security cabinet on Sunday that Iran must be willing to discuss “preventing the terrorist regime in Tehran from acquiring nuclear weapons, restrictions on its ballistic missiles, and an end to its support for the regional terrorist axis” – in short, everything Aragchi explicitly said he was unwilling to talk about.
“Should the Iranian regime, which has for decades oppressed its own people who aspire to freedom and justice, attempt to harm our sovereignty or our citizens, the consequences will be extremely severe. Any such attempt will be met with force and decisive action,” said the talking points for Netanyahu’s security cabinet meeting.
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