April 15, 2025, 6:04 p.m.
The Trump administration launched its first round of nuclear talks with officials from Tehran over the weekend amid concerns that Israel could take out Iran’s nuclear facilities and potentially pull the U.S. into a war to defend its Middle East ally.
Trump’s goal is to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. Leading the talks is his Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff, who is also the administration’s leading negotiator to end the wars between both Russia and Ukraine and Israel and Hamas. The Iranian talks took place in Oman through intermediaries. However, Witkoff reportedly spoke with Iranian officials in person, too, marking the first time the two adversaries engaged in high-level direct discussions since 2017. The White House said the preliminary talks with Tehran were “very positive and constructive.”
Still, the two sides appear far apart in terms of central issues. Iran has demanded sanctions relief in exchange for curbs on its nuclear program, and the Trump administration cannot remove all sanctions without congressional buy-in. The U.S., meanwhile, wants Iran to dismantle much of its nuclear program. That would likely include the destruction of advanced centrifuges, the export of much of the country’s highly enriched uranium, and an agreement to allow international inspectors into the country regularly.
Unlike the previous Iran nuclear deal the Obama administration struck in 2015, Trump administration officials have said they will accept only a deal with no sunset provisions. The last agreement allowed some restrictions to wind down after 10 or 15 years. What’s more, the Trump administration may ask Iran to place limits on its ballistic-missile program. Many observers believe it’s unlikely that Iran will agree to such demands.
Amidst the uncertainty around what a new Iran deal could look like, Salah Bayazzidi, a representative of Iran’s Kurdish population in Washington, wants the Trump administration to know that the Iranian people would fill the vacuum if the regime, led by the aging supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, were to fall eventually.
“Young people in Iranian Kurdistan and throughout Iran are different from the older generation. They want to integrate into the global economy and global thinking. They want to enjoy their life without any specific ideology,” Bayazzidi said. “If something happens in Iran, Iran will not be chaos. Iranian groups, the Kurds, and the Iranian opposition are capable of forming a unity government with the help of the [U.S.] administration.”
Bayazzidi is no stranger to political opposition. He was first jailed in Iran for his Kurdish activism when he was 16 years old. After he was released two years later, he could not find work or move around the country freely. The regime made life impossible for minority activists. Eventually, he left Iran for Turkey and made it to Canada in 1991. Twenty years later, he relocated to Washington, D.C., and now represents the Komala Party of Iranian Kurdistan, a social democratic political party. Several months ago, the party called for a general strike in Iran’s Kurdish region, and thousands of small businesses joined, demonstrating the strong links between party leaders in the diaspora and people in the country.
“There has been a lot of discussion about the Iraqi Kurds in U.S. politics for decades. There’s discussion about the Turkish Kurds and, recently, about the Syrian Kurds, but we barely hear about the Iranian Kurds. Some people call it the forgotten struggle,” Bayazzidi told National Journal. “The Kurdish conflict is very, very important in Iran. When the revolution took place in 1979, Kurds hoped for a free and democratic Iran.”
The Kurds are a large ethnic group living in regions of Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Iran. There are estimated to be about 40 million Kurds in the Middle East, making them one of the world’s largest stateless populations. They have worked closely with U.S. forces against the Islamic State in both Iraq and Syria. Bayazzidi argues that the Kurds could also be close allies of the U.S. in Iran.
Still, the Kurds are not the only group who could work for a new democratic Iran. In 2022—when widespread protests erupted after the country’s morality police killed a young Kurdish woman arrested for allegedly not covering her hair—a conference at Georgetown University sought to bring together Iran’s fractured diaspora and opposition groups.
Ultimately, Iran's Woman, Life, Freedom movement was repressed, and the diaspora's attempts to organize in Washington fizzled out. But Bayazzidi argues that the so-called Georgetown coalition remains a model for what a multi-ethnic, democratic Iran could look like. The Komala Party also has a lofty list of demands that range from dissolving Iran’s Islamic courts to ending all discrimination based on gender or ethnicity.
While that may seem like a long shot, Iranian opposition members argue that the regime is weaker today than it’s been at any other time in recent history. That’s largely why the Iranian government, fearful that a war against Israel or Washington could lead to its demise, is now ready to negotiate.
Still, it’s unclear how much progress is possible. In 2018, Trump withdrew from the original nuclear deal between Iran and six world powers—the U.S., Russia, China, France, Britain, and Germany, a format known as P5+1—even though international observers assessed that the Obama-era deal had been working and Tehran was not developing a nuclear weapon.
The Trump administration then imposed steep sanctions on Iran. Republican lawmakers have argued that the sanctions prevented Tehran from pouring resources into its nuclear program and funding its proxy groups throughout the Middle East. However, Iran has ramped up its nuclear enrichment in the years since.
That sequence of events created an atmosphere of distrust between the two countries, with hard-liners in Iran arguing that they cannot trust Washington to stick with a deal. What’s more, the advanced stage of Iran’s current nuclear development makes denuclearization efforts more complex, and this time, Washington is negotiating without the help of its allies in Europe.
Moreover, many in Washington are rooting for the talks to fail. After returning to Washington from Oman, Witkoff said that the Trump team could seek to limit Iran’s nuclear enrichment to 3.67 percent, the same level as the Obama-era deal.
“This has resulted in a little bit of panic by the opponents of diplomacy in Washington that the Trump administration has already given away the whole store to the Iranians by accepting that there will be an enrichment program on Iranian soil,” said Ali Vaez, director of the Iran program at the International Crisis Group. “The reality is that zero enrichment, or the so-called Libya model of seeking to dismantle Iran’s nuclear program completely, has been the ultimate objective in negotiations for most of the past 22 years, except maybe in the four years of Obama’s second term. It’s not a new position, and it’s never delivered anything other than exponential growth of Iran’s nuclear program.”
In a subsequent statement, Witkoff appeared to walk back his previous comments, saying Iran must “eliminate its nuclear enrichment” program.
Meanwhile, Trump has suggested that bombs could fall on Iran if a deal isn’t reached. He later conceded that Israel would likely take the lead in a military strike. Many observers expect that Israel would strike Iran’s two leading nuclear sites, Natanz and Fordow, and that such a strike would likely plunge the Middle East into a wider war because Iran would retaliate.
Trump has said the talks should end by the summer, and the next round will occur over the weekend. Still, the Biden administration’s previous attempts to revive the Iran nuclear agreement also eventually failed. In Washington, some are hoping that these negotiations will suffer a similar fate and that subsequent events will lead to the Iranian regime’s demise.
“There are alternatives. Everyone is talking about how this is the small window of opportunity to get rid of the regime,” said Bayazzidi from Washington. “This is the time. Either now or never.”
