A nuclear deal between Washington and Tehran could be made public before the week is out, and it’s already shaping up to be one of the more unusual diplomatic documents you’ll ever read.
US Vice-President JD Vance confirmed on Tuesday that an agreement is close, describing it as “about a page and a half” in length and “very general” in its terms. For context, the original 2015 nuclear accord, the JCPOA, ran to well over 100 pages. This one won’t be troubling anyone’s printer cartridge.
The brevity is deliberate, Vance suggested. The idea is to lock in a broad framework now, with the finer technical details, enrichment limits, inspection regimes, sanction timelines, hammered out in follow-up negotiations. Whether that counts as a deal or simply a very expensive handshake is a question already being asked in Washington.
“It’s a framework, not a finished product,” one senior American official told reporters, asking not to be named. “Think of it as the headline, not the whole story.”
Iran’s position has shifted considerably in recent months. Facing a battered economy, a weakened regional network of proxies, and a currency that has lost enormous value, Tehran has shown a willingness to come back to the table that it hadn’t displayed since before Donald Trump’s first-term withdrawal from the JCPOA back in 2018.
Trump’s so-called “maximum pressure” campaign, which reimposed sweeping sanctions after that withdrawal, is now being held up by his team as the reason Iran is negotiating at all. Critics, including several European diplomats, argue the approach wasted years and allowed Iran to advance its uranium enrichment programme significantly closer to weapons-grade levels.
Enrichment is, of course, the central sticking point. Iran insists it has the right to enrich uranium on its own soil. The Trump administration has said publicly it wants that number as close to zero as possible. Bridging that gap in a page and a half of text will require some remarkably elastic language.
If the deal does land before Friday, the harder question won’t be what’s on those pages. It’ll be what isn’t.
