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If President Donald Trump rejects the deal that Iranians offered at their talks in Geneva, it can be for only one of two reasons: Either he doesn’t want a deal—or he doesn’t want a deal that resembles President Barack Obama’s 2014 accord, which Trump tore up in 2018 after calling it “the worst deal ever.”

In Tuesday’s State of the Union address, Trump said he would prefer to settle the current crisis through diplomacy, but only if Tehran’s leaders said they “will never have a nuclear weapon”—words, Trump claimed, that “we haven’t heard.”

Actually, they have spoken those words, many times, though of course it’s another matter whether we should trust them. Iran is also a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which makes the same pledge.

What Iranians do refuse to say is that they will never enrich any uranium. This is one of the stumbling blocks in the negotiations, though it shouldn’t be.

In the latest round of talks through an Omani intermediary, Iran now says it is willing to suspend enrichment for the next three years—that is, for as long as Trump is president. After then, it would limit enrichment to purity levels of 1.5 percent and allow international inspectors to verify the pledge.

The thing is this: The NPT allows signatories to enrich uranium for “peaceful” purposes, such as electricity or medical research. In fact, Article IV of the treaty enshrines enrichment as an “inalienable right.” The nuclear deal that Iran signed with the United States and five other countries in 2014 limited this enrichment to purity levels of 3.5 percent. (It takes 90 percent enrichment for uranium to be “weapons-grade.”) By the time Trump tore up the deal, Iran was abiding by it, according to inspectors with the International Atomic Energy Agency. Iran had also dismantled much of its stockpile of “highly enriched” uranium.

Now, after eight years of unconstrained activity, Iran has a large quantity of uranium enriched to 60 percent, meaning that, if its leaders wanted, they could have enough for an atom bomb in a........

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