A Deal With Iran Is Near But Not Final, Senior Us Official Says

A preliminary deal with Iran to end more than three months of war is close but not done, according to a senior administration official, who pegged the odds of success at 80 to 85 percent.

The reason for the newfound confidence, which comes just a day after President Donald Trump threatened to hit “Iran very hard,” owes to Tehran’s specific commitment to remove its remaining enriched material, said the senior official, who was granted anonymity to discuss sensitive diplomatic discussions.

“We’ve gotten the language in a place that the president is much happier on,” the official said. “The specificity over the destruction and removal of the enriched material – that is a big change.”

But lingering mistrust hangs over the negotiations and could stall progress at any moment. And Trump has repeatedly shifted his position. On Friday, he groused that Iran was leaking false reports of the deal and called its leadership “dishonorable people.”

Still, both Iran and the U.S. appear to be pressing toward an agreement that would reopen the Strait of Hormuz, the vital waterway through which roughly 20 percent of the world’s oil flowed before the war began.

Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi posted on X Friday that an agreement “has never been closer,” though he did not provide details of the deal.

Iran will not make any nuclear concessions upfront, the U.S. official acknowledged. Rather, this is an agreement to continue talking about how to remove enriched material, some of which is buried deep underground after the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran’s nuclear sites last year.

“The technical details need to be figured out, but I think there's a commitment to do that,” the official said. “There's also a commitment to dismantling the nuclear weapons program, there's a commitment to decommissioning the nuclear sites, and of course we're going to figure out how to do that in the technical negotiations that will follow.”

Those talks are meant to last 60 days, though it is unclear when that clock begins or what happens if the deadline passes without a resolution.

As part of the initial agreement, Iran has also committed to never obtain a nuclear weapon, the official said. Iran pledged to do so more than five decades ago when it signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty that prevents non-nuclear states from developing atomic weapons. But its nuclear advances in recent years have repeatedly called that commitment into question.

Unlike previous rounds of negotiations, the senior administration official said there’s also more confidence that Iran’s Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei has signed off on the current text – an essential precondition.

“The people, both on the civilian and military side … have attested that the supreme leader is comfortable with where we are in the negotiation,” the senior administration official said.

The official repeatedly cautioned that Iran will only see the benefits of the deal — a significant relief of economic sanctions — after the U.S. establishes an investigatory regime that they confidently believe can track Iran’s nuclear disposal process.

"Fundamentally, there's just a lot of mistrust. So, people ask, ‘Do you trust that they're going to honor their deal?’ No, I don't trust that they're going to honor their deal, but I do trust that we’ve structured the deal in such a way where they don't get their benefits unless we get our benefits,” the official said. “And that's how we're going to walk down this pathway of a negotiated settlement."

Though Trump and his team have touted the memorandum of understanding they expect to be signed in the coming days as fulfilling his promises on Iran's nuclear program, much will depend on the technical discussions and both sides' commitment to seeing them through.

Arab officials have been skeptical throughout the talks that Iran intends to make any significant nuclear concessions.

And Israeli officials on Friday warned that they have the ability to “act independently" should they feel that Iran retains the ability to acquire a nuclear weapon.

Iran has pushed for economic relief and some form of it appears to be on the table, though how it would be structured and when it would be delivered has not been agreed to. It hinges on Iran’s cooperation toward eliminating its nuclear material, the official said.

“We really structured this in such a way where, as we build trust, as the Iranians perform, they get economic relief. I think that could be a very big and very good thing for Iran and the people of the world. It could also mean very minimal things, because they only performed a very minimal way," the official said.

And there may be workarounds that would allow Tehran to access money without technically touching frozen funds. As part of the negotiations, the U.S. and Iran have discussed giving Tehran access to restricted funds held in Qatar and elsewhere that could total more than $16 billion, POLITICO previously reported.

The UAE has agreed to unlock at least $10 billion for Iran, including $3 billion that has already been delivered, Reuters reported on Friday, in what could be an example of such an arrangement. UAE President Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed al-Nahyan was one of the leaders who spoke with Trump on Friday to assure him a deal was close.

U.S. officials leading the deal include Vice President JD Vance, chief of staff Susie Wiles, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, special envoy Steve Witkoff, the president's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and CIA Director John Ratcliffe. In addition, the president “was very involved” in the language around destroying and removing enriched nuclear material, the official said.