STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Jake Sullivan has been listening with us. He served as President Biden's national security adviser, focused often on Iran issues. And before that, under President Obama, Sullivan helped to negotiate a nuclear agreement with Iran. Mr. Sullivan, welcome back.
JAKE SULLIVAN: Thanks for having me.
INSKEEP: I'm following the news of these talks, which appear to have begun in Oman. And according to Reuters, at least initially, Steve Witkoff and Iran's foreign minister are in the same city but not talking. One of them tells something to Oman's foreign minister, he goes in the next room and tells the other guy. Why do they do that? And what is it like to do that?
SULLIVAN: Well, Iran's supreme leader, the ayatollah, is famously reluctant to have his negotiators in the same room with American negotiators ever since President Trump in his first term pulled out of the nuclear deal. So the ayatollah thinks, these Americans, we just can't trust them. Let's work through our brothers in Oman. It's a silly way to do business, Steve, because you've got the Iranian delegation in one room. Right down the hall, you have the American delegation. And this happened during our administration as well, and it's happened with Steve Witkoff and the Iranian foreign minister before. It's inefficient. Things can get lost in translation. And my hope would be, and I think the Americans' expectation would be they will get in the same room at some point today.
INSKEEP: Which sounds much more like Steve Witkoff's style. We know he reaches out. He calls Vladimir Putin directly. He does that sort of thing. That would seem to be the way he would want to handle this.
SULLIVAN: Well, absolutely. And the only way to handle a delicate and sensitive negotiation against the backdrop of the threat of military force is to have the two sides be face to face. We negotiated the first Iran nuclear deal, and we were able to do so because we were sitting in the same room. And being able to test whether the maximum Iran can give here meets the minimum President Trump can accept, that requires a face-to-face negotiation.
INSKEEP: Well, let's talk through the particulars of the maximum and the minimum. In this circumstance, Greg Myre noted for us that the Iranians seem willing to talk about their nuclear program, maybe put some further limits on their nuclear program. The United States wants to talk about a lot more because they have a lot of other concerns. How would you bridge that if you were in that room?
SULLIVAN: I think this is the critical difficulty in this negotiation. I believe there is room for maneuver for Iran to make concessions, like shipping out that stockpile of highly enriched uranium to a third country so it's no longer any kind of threat. I think that's possible. I think it's much more difficult for Iran to agree, for example, to give up its missile program or to end its support for groups across the region, terrorist groups like Hezbollah, for example.
So what the Americans are going to try to do is come up with formulas on those two issues that Iran could accept and be able to come back and say, we got something more than just the nuclear concessions. Their capacity to do that, I think it's going to be extremely difficult. I don't entirely rule it out, but it will be hard for the two sides to come to an agreement based on their positions going into these talks. And I think Iran is probably playing for time, hoping that after this round of talks, they can have another round of talks rather than having President Trump turn to military action.
INSKEEP: The president one time was talking about intervening militarily because there are also protests in Iran, Iranians rising up for a time against their own government because of a currency collapse and many other complaints and concerns. And they were violently repressed in recent days after the president of the United States seemed to promise to come to their aid. If in the end the United States made some deal over the nuclear file or more, would that be a betrayal of the Iranian protesters because the U.S. would leave the government in place?
SULLIVAN: Well, it certainly would mean that President Trump did not follow through on what he said he would do, which publicly he said that if, in fact, the Iranian regime cracked down brutally and killed protesters, the United States would attack Iran. And he told the protesters, quote, "help is on the way." In fact, as news reports continue to come out of Iran, it appears that possibly tens of thousands of Iranians were brutally massacred in this repressive crackdown by the government. And so, President Trump's red line has absolutely been crossed. If he doesn't take military action, I think he will face questions as to why he chose not to follow through on the threat that he made.
INSKEEP: Would he just have to take that hit if he saw that there was more interest for the United States in making a deal?
SULLIVAN: Well, this is a president who's notably willing to shift course on a lot of different issues. So he probably thinks of himself as having room for flexibility and the capacity to do a deal on the nuclear program without backing the protesters up. But it would raise questions both today and in history.
INSKEEP: Former national security adviser Jake Sullivan, good to talk with you again. Thanks so much.
SULLIVAN: Thank you for having me. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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