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Iran has promised Trump its oil riches. It could be a clever ploy to avoid war - THE TELEGRAPH
Iran has put something unprecedented on the negotiating table with the United States as it tries to avoid war and save its nuclear enrichment programme.
The Islamic Republic has offered Donald Trump access to the oil and gas wealth it has guarded from the US since the 1979 revolution.
The question is whether Tehran means it, or whether veteran Iranian diplomats are preparing to execute a sophisticated con game to pacify the US president.
The talks are aimed at curbing Iran’s nuclear capabilities in exchange for the lifting of sanctions that have devastated its economy.
Mr Trump has warned Tehran that it has 10 to 15 days to make a “meaningful deal” with Washington, or face American air strikes.
Hamid Ghanbari, the deputy foreign minister, said that Iran had formally proposed economic arrangements that would have been unthinkable even weeks ago.
“Mutual interests in the areas of oil and gas, joint fields, mining investments and even aircraft purchases have been included in the text of negotiations,” Mr Ghanbari said.
Iran’s oil minister also said on Friday that cooperation with the United States in the oil and gas sectors was possible as part of the nuclear deal.
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The proposal addresses what Iranian officials now acknowledge was a fatal flaw in the 2015 nuclear agreement: the US gained no economic benefits from compliance.
This made Mr Trump’s 2018 withdrawal from the deal politically costless at home.
By creating American corporate stakeholders with billions at risk if a deal is not signed or collapses, Iran hopes to build domestic US constituencies for compliance.
“This time, for the sustainability of the agreement, it is necessary that America also be able to benefit in areas with high and rapid economic returns,” Mr Ghanbari said.
While American companies were effectively locked out by sanctions under the deal, Russian and Chinese firms expanded their footprint in Iran while European multinationals – Total, Peugeot and Siemens among them – moved in.
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Behzad Naziri-Rad, an Iranian analyst, told The Telegraph: “From an economic perspective, when one of the main players feels that no new interests have been created for it, it will not have an incentive to maintain the agreement.”
When Mr Trump decided to walk away, no US corporate lobby existed to push back. No constituency in Washington had billions at stake.
Whether the oil offer shows genuine Iranian intent is a different question entirely, however.
The makeup of Tehran’s negotiating team calls its commitment to the talks into question, and suggests they might be attempting to deceive their inexperienced American counterparts.
The oil offer might be an attempt by Iran to sign any deal to see off Mr Trump’s threats of war and stall until he leaves office in 2028.
Abbas Araghchi, the foreign minister, and Majid Takht-Ravanchi, his deputy, were the architects of the 2015 agreement, veterans of years of technical negotiations with Western powers, and among the most experienced nuclear diplomats in the world.
Opposite them sits Steve Witkoff, Mr Trump’s special envoy, a real estate investor with no background in non-proliferation, whose previous diplomatic forays have drawn scepticism even from American allies.
The asymmetry is clear, and former regime insiders believe Iranian negotiators are well aware of it.
Tehran’s negotiators have historically been adept at creating deliberate ambiguity – language that reads as a concession in English and a preservation of capability in Persian.
The 2015 deal itself contained provisions that both sides subsequently interpreted in irreconcilable ways. There is no obvious reason to expect that dynamic has changed.
Compounding this is the question of what Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader, wants, versus what he says in public.
On the day the Geneva talks were held, Khamenei threatened to sink US aircraft carriers and declared Iran’s missile programme non-negotiable. At the same time, his foreign minister was in Switzerland offering American companies access to Iranian oil fields.
A founding member of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps suggested that Iranian negotiators would privately tell Mr Witkoff to ignore Khamenei’s public threats as domestic theatre.
“They would say the same thing to Mr Witkoff and would tell him to say hi to Mr Trump – these speeches are just for domestic purposes,” Mohsen Sazegara told The Telegraph.
That contradiction is not new. It is a feature of how the Islamic Republic has navigated nuclear diplomacy for more than two decades.
Khamenei maintains his revolutionary credentials in public while his negotiators make pragmatic concessions, a structure that provides him plausible deniability if a deal fails and the ability to claim credit if it succeeds.
Iranian insiders who have been in the room say he was personally briefed on every line of the 2015 agreement even as he publicly maintained suspicion of it.
The same strategy appears to be in play now.
The substantive gaps between the two sides suggest that any agreement remains a distant prospect.
The Trump administration has demanded zero uranium enrichment under any deal.
Iran has declared that enrichment rights under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty are non-negotiable – a position that has not shifted across multiple administrations and several rounds of negotiations.
But Khamenei’s repeated public appearances this week and threats to the US, for domestic audiences, show that he feels emboldened. This might be a sign that his negotiators are giving concessions in the talks, while he works to save face at home.
This would be necessary, as Iran’s domestic politics make the oil offer fragile.
Oil nationalisation is not just a policy position in the Islamic Republic. It is foundational to the regime’s identity.
Prime minister Mohammad Mosaddegh’s 1953 seizure of oil fields from British control, and the CIA-backed coup that overthrew him for doing it, seeded the grievance that drove the 1979 revolution.
Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini built the Islamic Republic on the principle that Iran would never again allow foreign powers to profit from its resources.
Offering that same resource to American corporations would be the single most potent weapon available to hardliners seeking to destabilise any agreement from within.
