President Trump’s Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff suggested during a recent interview that the United States could walk away from ongoing nuclear talks with Iran if no progress ensues after the forthcoming meeting on Sunday in Oman.
“We didn’t think that the talks last week were going to be productive because we needed to get to certain understandings with them, and hopefully, this Sunday they will be productive. Hopefully, that means they will continue those talks. If they are not productive on Sunday, then they won’t continue and we’ll have to take a different route,” Witkoff said in a wide-ranging interview with Breitbart News that was released Friday.
Witkoff, who is overseeing a large foreign policy portfolio that includes helping bring a ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine and the release of hostages held by Hamas, is expected to travel to Oman on Sunday for the fourth round of nuclear discussions between Washington and Tehran, a U.S. source familiar with the matter said Friday.
The talks, similarly to previous meetings, are expected to be direct and indirect, the source added.
“An enrichment program can never exist in the state of Iran ever again. That’s our red line. No enrichment. That means dismantlement, it means no weaponization, and it means that Natanz, Fordow, and Isfahan—those are their three enrichment facilities—have to be dismantled,” Witkoff said in the interview.
Witkoff has been the lead negotiator on the U.S. side. Iran has been represented by its foreign minister, Seyed Abbas Araghchi, who last week said that the Islamic Republic must be permitted to enrich uranium.
“As a founding signatory to the NPT, Iran has every right to possess the full nuclear fuel cycle. Moreover, there are several NPT members which enrich uranium while wholly rejecting nuclear weapons. Apart from Iran, this club includes several Asian, European, and South American nations,” Araghchi said on social media last Friday. “Maximalist positioning and incendiary rhetoric achieve nothing except eroding the chances of success.”
The two sides have held three rounds of talks so far. Two took place in Muscat, the capital of Oman, and the other was in Rome.
The fourth round that was slated to take place in Italy were postponed last week over “logistical reasons,” Omani Foreign Minister Badr al-Busaidi said.
Witkoff told Breitbart News that Iran notified the U.S. that it does not want a nuclear weapon.
“They have stated back that they don’t want one,” Witkoff said. “So we’re going to, for the purposes of this discussion, take them at their word that that’s actually how they feel. If that’s how they feel, then their enrichment facilities have to be dismantled.”
Wiktoff’s upcoming meeting in Oman is scheduled right before Trump is set to embark on a multi-state trip to the Middle East next week.
Trump has warned Tehran in recent weeks that if diplomacy around Iran’s expanding nuclear weapons program falls apart, military strikes could follow.
Witkoff said any potential nuclear deal with Iran would be much tougher than the one negotiated by former President Obama, an agreement that Trump pulled out of in 2018, during his first White House term.
“First of all, we’re never doing a JCPOA deal where sanctions come off and there’s no sunsetting of their obligations. That doesn’t make sense,” Witkoff said. “That was a mismatched procedure in JCPOA.”
