David E. Sanger

And the Iranians have had a consistent position that they're a signatory of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, that all signatories have a right to enrich uranium as long as they are not diverting it to bomb projects.

They maintain that they've long committed to

to never building a nuclear weapon.

None of us believe that, but that has been their formal commitment.

I think they believe that the administration may well relent on this point and that they will get a pause of a few years in which they agree not to produce any nuclear fuel and then some limited amount of enrichment after that, that they would stay in the game.

Now, if the Trump administration agreed to that, it would be a big backing away from their position.

It would also end up looking a lot more like the agreement that President Obama got out of Iran in 2015, in which the Iranians shipped almost all their nuclear fuel out of the country but kept low-level enrichment.

Absolutely.

The Iranians cannot have missed the point.

that the Trump administration has not attacked North Korea.

North Korea has missiles that can reach the United States, not sometime in the future, but now.

North Korea has 60 or more nuclear weapons, not at some point in the future, but now.

And that's the very reason that the U.S.

wouldn't even consider an attack like this on Pyongyang.

And so, you know, depending on how this all plays out, we may have just given Iran every incentive to follow the North Korean model.

They are capable of it, Michael.

And I did cover that negotiation for the year and a half or two years that it went on.

And it was long and painful.

And in the end, it resulted in an agreement that the Iranians largely kept to until President Trump pulled out of the accord in 2018.

And historians will be debating for a long time whether you can draw a straight line from that decision in 2018 to this attack.