When negotiators gather in Geneva on Thursday for the third round of indirect talks between Iran and the United States, the most consequential item in the room will not be a summary of earlier rounds. It will be a written proposal from Tehran — designed to test whether diplomacy still has a viable path before the military one becomes irreversible.

The first two rounds, in Oman on 6th February and Geneva on 17th February, clarified principles. This round is about definition. Washington has shifted the burden: put your offer on paper, and we will judge whether it crosses the threshold worth taking to Trump. If it does, real bargaining begins. If it does not, the diplomatic runway closes while the largest American military buildup in the Middle East since 2003 is already in position.

That is why the document matters more than the meeting itself. The text must give Trump a result he can present as tougher than the JCPOA while allowing Khamenei to claim Iran has not surrendered the principle it has defended for two decades: that peaceful nuclear technology is not something to be signed away under coercion. But Tehran also knows that Trump left the JCPOA not just over sunsets and inspection gaps, but because sanctions relief, in his judgment, strengthened Iran’s wider missile and regional posture. A paper that looks like a nuclear fix but ignores that political memory is unlikely to survive the trip to the Oval Office.

The lesson Tehran drew from spring 2025 is brutal. Five rounds narrowed gaps, but the process was phased and exposed to faster actors. Once the sixty-day window Trump had given Tehran expired, Netanyahu struck first. Tehran treated the next round as void. Days later, American bombers hit Natanz, Fordow and Isfahan beyond Israeli reach. A proposal that unfolds over months gives opponents time to destroy it. Whatever Tehran brings to Geneva is built around one rule: create hard-to-reverse facts faster than spoilers can move.

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Turning wreckage into currency

The formal text is expected to be nuclear in scope — Araghchi has been categorical that missiles and regional partners sit outside the core file. Yet this is where the June 2025 war changes the bargaining logic. Both sides now speak from the same broad reality: Trump has called the principal sites “obliterated”; Araghchi has described them as seriously damaged and partly inaccessible. The nuclear proposal is best understood as a conversion strategy: turning damaged leverage into diplomatic value before it decays.

Consider the likely centrepiece. Tehran has signalled willingness to ship roughly half its stockpile of uranium enriched to sixty per cent abroad and dilute the remainder under monitoring. Publicly, this reads as a dramatic concession. In bargaining terms, it is monetisation — trading a vulnerable asset, the near-sole tangible product of what Javad Zarif once valued at half a trillion dollars of nuclear investment, for sanctions relief and a path back into a process Tehran can still shape.

There is a deadline most commentary underplays: the IAEA Board of Governors convenes on 2–6 March. A proposal delivered before that session can shape the frame; one delayed beyond it risks being judged in a far less favourable environment. Geneva is not simply a diplomatic round. It is a pre-Board move.

Enrichment remains the hardest point. Witkoff has restated Trump’s demand for “zero enrichment”. Araghchi has claimed that Washington has not sought zero enrichment in the room, and that the real issue is ensuring Iran’s programme remains peaceful.

Enrichment remains the hardest point. Witkoff has restated Trump’s demand for “zero enrichment”. Araghchi has claimed that Washington has not sought zero enrichment in the room, and that the real issue is ensuring Iran’s programme remains peaceful.

If Washington is willing to study limited, token enrichment under a no-breakout framework, and if Tehran is willing to package severe operational limits as confidence-building rather than capitulation, the talks still have a workable lane.

Tehran’s likely formula separates principle from operation. Iran reserves the right to peaceful enrichment — without which no deal is politically saleable in Tehran — while accepting constraints so severe that the gap between suspension and elimination becomes academic. No enrichment while damage assessment, site access and verification proceed. The twelve-day war imposed the pause; diplomacy packages it into sanctions relief.

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The most important innovation in such a framework would be geographical. Any resumed enrichment would be confined to low-level work at a single declared, above-ground facility under continuous monitoring. Banning underground enrichment changes the enforcement calculus: future violations occur where both the United States and Israel can reach them. The deal moves closer to being self-enforcing — something no arrangement built around buried capacity could claim.

What centrifuges cannot solve

Yet even the strongest nuclear text walks into the critique that destroyed the JCPOA. Trump withdrew not only over nuclear terms but because sanctions relief financed Iran’s missile programme and proxy network. Money is fungible at the state level. Any deal that repeats this pattern invites the same political death.

No agreement can control every future Iranian budgetary choice. But a deal can reduce the immediate security consequences that make sanctions relief politically toxic in Washington and strategically unacceptable in Tel Aviv — the difference between a deal that can be signed and one that can survive.

Tehran will not sign a missile disarmament annex. But there is a wide space between missiles on the table and no meaningful restraint at all — and that space must address Israel directly. Iran’s missile force and partner networks were not built in abstraction; without credible restraint on that front, Netanyahu will treat any accord as a breathing space before the next confrontation.

In practice, this could mean restraints on strategic missile testing and precision-guidance transfers to non-state partners during implementation, a channel to contain escalation, and a commitment framed in the language of Article 2(4) of the UN Charter — refraining from threatening the territorial integrity or political independence of any state — that addresses Israel without being presented as a concession. A suspension of hostile rhetoric would give Trump a visible achievement Obama never had. None of this eliminates the fungibility problem. But it constrains what fungible resources can operationally produce — precisely what the JCPOA never did.

A deal that lowers nuclear risk while leaving the political logic of confrontation untouched will not hold for long.

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Why both sides might take the wager

The military alternative carries constraints the carrier groups do not advertise.

A sustained campaign would face munitions depth concerns, allied hesitation and escalation risks. Iran’s missile reserves remain significant and any campaign that allows retaliatory launch risks regional escalation, energy disruption and a war whose end-state is far harder to define than its opening phase.

A sustained campaign would face munitions depth concerns, allied hesitation and escalation risks. Iran’s missile reserves remain significant and any campaign that allows retaliatory launch risks regional escalation, energy disruption and a war whose end-state is far harder to define than its opening phase.

For Tehran, the calculus is different but equally hard-edged. If the Islamic Republic passes through the most intense American military pressure since Iraq without capitulating or entering a war it cannot control, it will present that as proof that strategic endurance works. That may explain why the nuclear concessions could look sharper than expected. Tehran is not bargaining for an ideal settlement. It is bargaining for passage through the Trump era.

The paper’s pitch goes beyond centrifuges: a harder nuclear framework than Obama got, underground enrichment banned, the most dangerous stockpile removed, hostile rhetoric suspended, missile and proxy transfers constrained — with enforcement options preserved. For a president who measures outcomes in superlatives, that may prove more attractive than a strike whose aftermath nobody has defined.

There are obvious reasons this could fail. Iranian hardliners can attack it as repackaged surrender. American hawks can dismiss it as tactical delay. Israeli officials can argue it merely postpones a strike on worse terms. All three critiques carry force. But that is what makes this proposal consequential — not because it guarantees a deal, but because it is likely the last attempt to build one before the military timeline overtakes the diplomatic one.

Tehran’s negotiators understand that “more attractive” is not the same as “accepted.” They are writing for a reader who tore up the last agreement and later struck the country that had stayed in the deal after Washington left it. What arrives in Geneva is not an act of trust. It is a wager — calculated, reluctant, and placed against a clock that has nearly run out.

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