Negotiators had reached agreement on key issues despite the Trump team's idiosyncratic approach. Two days later, war began. In the many bizarre exchanges that occurred in the run-up to the US-Israeli attack on Iran, perhaps the most unexpected was an invitation by Donald Trump's special envoy Steve Witkoff for the Iranian foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, to join him and Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner for a visit to the USS Abraham Lincoln carrier strike group.
The idea that Araghchi would leave talks in Oman about the future of Iran's nuclear programme to tour a ship sent to the Gulf in an effort to dislodge his government seemed idiosyncratic at best. But it was symptomatic of the unorthodox way in which Kushner and Witkoff approached the nuclear talks that stretched through last year and this, and have twice been halted by Israeli and US airstrikes.
One Gulf diplomat, who has direct knowledge of the talks and is furious with Witkoff and Kushner's behaviour, described the pair as 'Israeli assets that had conspired to force the US president into entering a war from which he is now desperate to get himself out of'. Witkoff does not pretend to regional expertise – in one of his recent interviews he referred to the strait of Hormuz as the 'Gulf of Hormuz'. Similarly, he admitted in an interview that his knowledge of Iran's nuclear programme was sketchy, but insisted he 'was competent to discuss it since he had studied it'.
Yet, in the five sessions of the first round of talks last year – held before the 12-day June war – Witkoff rarely took notes and brought with him only Michael Anton, a hawkish essayist and political philosopher with no specialism in the Iran nuclear file. Anton was supposed to have an unnamed technical team back in Washington, and at times, as in May 2025, they could produce hard-core technical demands, but this level of expertise was never in the talks.
When talks resumed in Oman on 6 February, Witkoff, in a breach of protocol and to the surprise of Oman's foreign minister, Badr bin Hamad Al Busaidi, arrived in Muscat with Adm Brad Cooper, the commander of US forces in the Middle East, in full naval uniform. Witkoff's explanation was that 'he just happened to be in the neighbourhood'. Cooper was politely asked to leave the talks by his Omani hosts.
In contrast, the Obama administration sent 10 senior officials from four different departments to talks with Iran in Vienna in 2009. The talks stretched over, in effect, three 24-hour days, and the negotiators were in constant touch with Washington to check details of the proposed deal. Quite why these indirect talks failed is not just a matter of historical curiosity, or a retrospective exercise in allocating blame for the start of such a disastrous war; it is relevant to whether a nuclear deal only is feasible or whether a broader agreement will be necessary now.
