By Kevin Liptak, CNN
(CNN) — After passing notes for three-and-a-half hours Tuesday, Iranian and American negotiators departed their indirect talks in Geneva with an agreement to keep talking. What they’re talking about, exactly, remains an open question.
It’s unclear if the two sides are focused just on Iran’s nuclear program or other issues like the country’s ballistic missiles. Iran’s top negotiator said only that they’d arrived at a “set of guiding principles.” An American official was more circumspect, acknowledging “there are still a lot of details to discuss.”
The readout hardly eased growing fears of an impending regional war. Some officials have started to wonder how long President Donald Trump will allow diplomatic efforts to proceed. Adding to the sense of malaise, Iran conducted military exercises with cruise missiles and boats as the talks were underway, briefly closing the Strait of Hormuz.
Trump “reserves the ability to say when he thinks that diplomacy has reached its natural end,” Vice President JD Vance said in a Fox News interview, hours after the talks concluded Tuesday. He added that the two sides “agreed to meet afterwards” but that the Iranians have not acknowledged certain “red lines.”
So far, Trump has authorized the incremental back-and-forth that often defines high-stakes international dealmaking, dispatching his envoys Steve Witkoff and son-in-law Jared Kushner to foreign compounds to exchange papers with Iranian diplomats through an Omani intermediary.
But Trump is also wary of being “tapped along” by an Iranian regime looking to play for time, according to people familiar with his thinking. His allies have warned him that could be Iran’s intent, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu emphasized that argument in an urgently scheduled meeting last week.
Trump is also acutely aware that every passing day without US military action is another day further from his initial promise — now nearly two months old — that he was coming to the assistance of Iranian protesters.
As the talks proceed, Trump has offered only loose deadlines.
“I guess over the next month, something like that,” he said when asked last Thursday if he envisioned a timeline. “Yeah, it shouldn’t take, I mean, it should happen quickly.”
Quickly, in diplomatic terms, can be relative. That is especially true when discussing the highly technical particulars of uranium enrichment, which in previous negotiations required the participation of nuclear physicists.
The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action — the Obama-era deal that Trump harshly criticized as too weak on Iran and ultimately withdrew from — took more than two years of painstaking negotiations to finalize. Trump’s own grinding negotiations with the Iranians early last year lasted months before eventually falling apart, resulting in US military strikes on Iran’s uranium enrichment sites over the summer.
Administration officials believe Iran is now more motivated to agree to a deal than in the past because of the dire state of its economy, strangled by western sanctions. The major US military buildup Trump has ordered around Iran is also intended to apply pressure.
Yet so far, the Iranians do not seem willing to immediately accede.
“This does not mean that we can reach an agreement quickly, but at least the path has begun,” Iran Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said Tuesday after noting the two sides agreed in their indirect talks to “move toward drafting the text of a possible agreement.”
Araghchi, who led Iran’s delegation in Geneva, said that no date had been set for future conversations. The American official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive negotiations, said the Iranians indicated they would “come back in the next two weeks with detailed proposals” to address the gaps in their negotiating positi