US special envoy Steve Witkoff on Monday described the final, unsuccessful efforts to reach a nuclear agreement with Iran that ultimately collapsed ahead of the United States launching major combat operations over the weekend.
“President Trump sent me and Jared there to really determine on his behalf whether they were serious about doing a deal that addressed his objectives,” Witkoff said, outlining a series of meetings he attended with Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump’s son in law, in Geneva aimed at curbing Tehran’s nuclear program.
According to Witkoff, the US delegation proposed a decadelong halt to uranium enrichment.
“We discussed with them ten years of no enrichment whatsoever, and we would pay for the fuel,” he said. “They rejected that, which told us at that very moment that they had no notion of doing anything other than retaining enrichment to the purpose of weaponizing.”
Witkoff said he and Kushner, who was tasked with brokering a deal with him, believed an agreement was likely unattainable by the end of the second meeting, but returned for a third round as a final effort.
“It was very clear it was going to be impossible, probably by the end of the second meeting, but then we went back to the third meeting just to give it the last college try,” he said. “They wanted us to report positivity,” Witkoff added. “It was not positive that meeting.”
The collapse of the talks led to Trump’s announcement of joint US-Israeli strikes on Iran.
Around the time of the operation, Trump publicly urged Tehran to make concessions. “They should make a deal, but they don’t want to quite go far enough,” he said Friday during a stop in Texas. “They don’t want to say the key words: ‘We’re not going to have a nuclear weapon.’”
