US and Iran Show Flexibility on Nuclear Deal, Turkey’s Foreign Minister Says

The coffee in Ankara was still hot when Hakan Fidan leaned forward, his voice dropping to something just above a murmur. For months, he had been shuttling between Washington and Tehran like a man trying to keep two temperamental neighbors from setting each other’s houses on fire. Now, finally, there was something to say.

“They’re both ready,” he told the Financial Times. “Not desperate. Not defeated. Ready.”

What Fidan described, in the careful language of diplomacy, was something the world had not seen in years: flexibility. Genuine, if guarded, movement on a nuclear deal that had long been left for dead.

For the first time, he said, the United States appeared willing to tolerate what it had once deemed unacceptable: Iranian uranium enrichment, conducted within what he called “clearly set boundaries.” Not a capitulation. Not a green light. But an acknowledgment, quietly arrived at, that some limits were not meant to be pushed past, only negotiated.

“The Iranians now recognize that they need to reach a deal with the Americans,” Fidan said. “And the Americans understand that the Iranians have certain limits. It’s pointless to try to force them.”

Until now, Washington’s position had been absolute: Iran must surrender its stockpile of uranium enriched to 60 percent fissile purity, a threshold that sits uncomfortably close to the 90 percent required for weapons-grade material. That demand, repeated across administrations, had become a wall neither side could scale.

But in recent weeks, something shifted. Fidan described conversations in which Iranian officials, including President Masoud Pezeshkian, spoke not of defiance but of rights—nuclear rights, they insisted, that no amount of sanctions could erase. Pezeshkian had made clear that the lifting of those sanctions was non-negotiable. But he also signaled, according to Fidan, that Tehran was prepared to accept restrictions on enrichment levels and a return to the strict inspection regime it had once honored under the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action.

“They genuinely want to reach a real agreement,” Fidan said.

The timing was anything but accidental. Just days earlier, American and Iranian diplomats had sat across from Omani mediators in Muscat, reviving a backchannel that had gone quiet for years. The meeting was unannounced, the venue undisclosed until after. But the message was unmistakable: both sides were tired of the brink.

Behind the scenes, however, the military machinery had not gone silent. President Donald Trump had repositioned a naval flotilla in the region, and on Tuesday, he floated the possibility of sending a second aircraft carrier to the Middle East. The signal was clear—talks were underway, but so were contingencies.

Fidan, who has spent years navigating the fault lines between East and West, allowed himself a rare note of warning. Any attempt to expand the negotiations to include Iran’s ballistic missile program, he said, would bring “nothing but another war.”

“You don’t fix one fire by throwing another match,” he added.

The State Department and the White House did not respond to requests for comment. In Washington, it was late, the kind of hour when official silence often speaks louder than words.

But in Ankara, the sun was climbing. And for the first time in a long while, the conversation was no longer about whether a deal was possible. It was about what kind of deal, and at what cost.

The diplomats hadn’t solved it yet. But they were finally talking.

 

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