WASHINGTON — Three months into his “four to five week” war, President Donald Trump appears no closer to solving his purported goal of forcing Iran to give up its highly enriched uranium, a problem he himself created when he withdrew from the nuclear agreement negotiated by predecessor Barack Obama.

“They want very much to make a deal,” Trump said again at a White House Cabinet meeting photo opportunity Wednesday. “But their navy is gone, as I’ve said a thousand times, their navy is gone, their air force is gone, everything’s gone, and they’re negotiating on fumes. But we’ll see what happens. Maybe we have to go back and finish it.”

Wednesday’s remarks came just four days after Trump claimed an agreement had been “largely negotiated” and that “final aspects and details of the deal are currently being discussed, and will be announced shortly.” While Trump and Iranian leadership both are unreliable narrators, reporting indicated Iran would only agree to “talks” about handing over its uranium.

Trump has repeatedly declared that the goal of the now 88-day-old war, which he began without consulting Congress or America’s traditional allies, is to stop Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, and there’s little indication Iran plans on giving ground on its HEU stockpile. What he neglects to mention is that Iran created every ounce of that material only after Trump tore up Obama’s Iran agreement.

Ever since the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, as the agreement was known, was signed in 2015 after two years of negotiations, Trump has falsely claimed that it actually gave Iran the permission and means to build nuclear weapons. He repeated that lie Wednesday: “It was the path for Iran to have a nuclear weapon very quickly. Years ago, they would have had a nuclear weapon.”

In fact, Obama’s agreement strictly limited Iran’s ability to enrich uranium and introduced an intrusive system of outside inspectors to monitor.

Iran’s leaders, who were eager for sanctions relief provided in return, were honoring the enrichment prohibition, something Trump’s first-term administration freely admitted. Trump, nonetheless, scrapped the agreement in 2018.

“The State Department and intelligence community had repeatedly confirmed that Iran was complying with the terms of the JCPOA when Trump unilaterally withdrew from it,” said Ned Price, a former CIA officer and a State Department official under former President Joe Biden.

Trump has claimed ever since he pulled out of the JCPOA that Iran wanted to make a “deal” with him. As he ran for reelection in 2020, he said repeatedly that Iran wanted one badly but was waiting for the start of his second term.

Then, as he ran to regain the White House after his Jan. 6, 2021, coup attempt failed, he claimed that he would strike a deal with Iran quickly after returning to office.

Instead, Trump attacked Iran twice, first in June 2025, and then on Feb. 28 — both times as productive negotiations were supposedly underway.

Now, almost three months into a war that has damaged the global and U.S. economies, has spiked oil and gas prices, has increased inflation, and has left 13 Americans and at least 1,500 Iranians dead, Trump continues to claim that Iran badly wants “a deal,” even as its leaders appear to stall and drag things out.

“There’s a tendency, especially when it comes to the Middle East, to be dismissive of American diplomacy and to assume that most problems require the use of military force. Many critics of the JCPOA were under the misimpression that the Iranian nuclear challenge would melt away once we struck its nuclear sites,” Price said. “Trump’s decision to test that proposition has proven that this was always pure folly and, ironically, underlined the enduring advantage of a diplomatic resolution.”

Robert Kagan, a top State Department official in Ronald Reagan’s administration and now a foreign policy analyst at the Brookings Institution, said Trump’s repeated false claims that a deal was close only serve to hide the truth of the war, noting Iran engaged U.S. forces on Monday.

“The fact that the Iranians felt emboldened to target American ships shows they are not afraid of a resumption of war because they know Trump has no good military options and that he wants out,” he said. “The war was over in March. The U.S. lost. Everything since then has been aimed at covering this up.”

He said the worst outcome of the war will be Iran’s newfound control over the Strait of Hormuz and one-fifth of the world’s oil traffic.

“Iran was deterred from closing the strait by fear it would invite this kind of attack which could pose a threat to the regime’s very existence,” he said. “Now they have proven they can survive an extended bombing campaign and still do unacceptable damage to the region, including control of the strait. Having driven Iran to prove this, we are now living in that world and there can be no return to the status quo ante.”

As for the enriched uranium, Iran can win on that point, as well, said John Bolton, one of Trump’s first-term national security advisers and a longtime advocate for attacking Iran to change its regime.

“Iran is playing for time. Trump is still desperate for a way to claim victory. Most importantly, there’s no real deal, just an extension of the cease fire and opening the strait,” he said. “Iran wins by kicking the nuclear issue down the road.”

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