While diplomats pass notes through intermediaries in Muscat, the centrifuges at Fordow keep spinning.
That’s the story of Iran’s nuclear deal in February 2026. Two tracks running simultaneously: one through hotel conference rooms in Oman, the other through tunnels carved 260 feet into a mountain near the holy city of Qom. The talking track is designed to look like progress. The enrichment track is designed to make progress irreversible.
And the United States, for its part, has parked the biggest aircraft carrier in its fleet off Iran’s coast—just in case anyone in Tehran mistakes diplomacy for weakness.
The Deal on the Table
The negotiations are indirect. Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi and American envoy Steve Witkoff don’t sit across from each other. Omani mediators shuttle between rooms. It’s choreography, not conversation—and both sides know the steps.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio has said publicly that a deal is “likely to succeed.” That’s a significant statement from a man not given to optimism about the Islamic Republic. What he means—and what Tehran hears—is that the United States is offering Iran a real off-ramp. Sanctions relief. Economic breathing room. A path back from the edge.
But Rubio’s conditions aren’t small. The US demands a comprehensive package: enrichment limits, ballistic missile restrictions, an end to proxy warfare through Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis, and—this is the one Tehran refuses to discuss—the treatment of Iran’s own people. It’s a maximalist ask. Iran has signaled it will only negotiate on nuclear issues. Everything else is off the table.
Meanwhile, the USS Harry S. Truman—the largest aircraft carrier in the US Navy’s fleet—is deployed to the Middle East, flanked by its full carrier strike group. Navy Admiral Brad Cooper, the top US military commander in the region, personally attended the Oman talks. That’s not subtle, and it wasn’t meant to be. America came to negotiate. It also came armed.
And then there’s Netanyahu.
The Israeli Prime Minister met with President Trump in Washington in early February. The meeting was warm—the two men have a transactional rapport that works—but Netanyahu’s conditions for any Iran deal were absolute: no enrichment capability that could produce a weapon, full dismantling of the infrastructure at Fordow and Natanz, and international inspections with actual teeth. Not the kind the IAEA has been running for a decade, where inspectors arrive on schedule and find freshly mopped floors. Real inspections. Unannounced. Unrestricted.
Netanyahu knows something the American public hasn’t fully absorbed: any deal that leaves Iran’s enrichment architecture intact is not a deal. It’s a pause.
What Iran Says vs. What Iran Does
Iran’s public posture is one of aggrieved patience. The Foreign Ministry speaks of sovereignty. State media broadcasts footage of military parades. The IRGC issues press releases about Iran’s “unbreakable will.” Araghchi called the Oman talks a “positive and good start.”
Positive. Good. Start. The language of people who need the world to look at the conference room, not the mountain.
Because inside the mountain—Fordow, which the Iranians call “Pickaxe Mountain”—activity has increased. Satellite imagery analyzed by open-source intelligence groups shows new construction, expanded ventilation systems, and vehicle traffic consistent with accelerated operations. Iran enriches uranium to 60%—a number that has no civilian justification. The JCPOA permitted 3.67%. Weapons-grade is 90%. The distance between 60 and 90 is a political decision, not a technical one.
The IAEA estimates Iran has stockpiled enough enriched material for nine nuclear warheads if further enriched to weapons-grade. Breakout time for producing fissile material is effectively zero. Actual weaponization—designing a deliverable warhead, miniaturizing it for a ballistic missile—would take months. But in October 2025, Khamenei reportedly authorized exactly that work: miniaturized warhead development for Iran’s ballistic missile program.
Iran says it wants peace. Iran enriches uranium to within a sprint of a bomb. Both of these things are happening at the same time, and anyone who tells you they’re not contradictory is either lying or not paying attention.
Iranian rhetoric has grown increasingly belligerent. State media and IRGC-affiliated accounts have published propaganda identifying US military bases across the Middle East, describing them as “within range.” Parliament Speaker Ghalibaf warned that “all American centers and forces across the entire region will be legitimate targets.” These are not the words of a nation that has found peace.
But here is the critical dynamic: Iran cannot attack America while negotiating. Striking US assets would collapse the talks instantly, trigger the very military response Iran cannot survive, and hand Washington a justification that even European allies would have to support. Iran needs to save face. It needs to posture strength for its domestic audience. And it desperately needs the sanctions relief that only a deal can provide.
So Iran does what it has always done: it talks about war while calculating how to avoid one.
The regime reads between the lines. It prefers subsidizing proxy wars—funding militias in Lebanon, Yemen, Iraq, and Gaza—over direct conflict with the United States. Proxies are cheaper. Proxies are deniable. And proxies bleed other people’s children, not Iranian ones. But here’s what has changed: the proxy network is in ruins. Hezbollah was gutted by Israel. Hamas is shattered. The Houthis are under sustained US and coalition strikes. Iran’s “ring of fire”—its network of allied militias encircling Israel—has largely collapsed.
Reports now suggest Turkey is positioning itself to fill parts of the strategic vacuum Iran’s proxies once occupied. Turkish influence is expanding in Syria, northern Iraq, and the eastern Mediterranean. The old architecture of Iranian regional dominance is being replaced—not by peace, but by new players with their own ambitions.
Iran is weaker than it has been in forty years. And weak regimes with nuclear programs are the most dangerous actors on earth.
The Pressure Campaign
The Trump administration’s strategy is not complicated. It is a vise, and both handles are turning.
On the economic side: sanctions have been tightened, reimposed, and expanded. Iran’s shadow fleet—the network of tankers that carry Iranian crude oil under false flags and forged documents to evade sanctions—has been targeted. Ships have been seized. Buyers have been warned. The goal is to choke Iran’s oil revenue, which funds everything from the IRGC to the centrifuges at Fordow.
The economic pain inside Iran is already severe. Inflation has gutted the rial. Energy shortages leave entire cities in rotating blackouts. The humiliation of the June 2025 Twelve-Day War with Israel—in which Iran launched over 550 ballistic missiles and 1,000 suicide drones and still lost decisively—shattered whatever confidence the public had in the regime’s military competence. Protests that began in December 2025 became the largest since the 2022 Mahsa Amini uprising and were met with a massacre that killed thousands.
The regime is broke. Its proxies are broken. Its people are furious. And the Americans are not letting up.
On the military side: the carrier deployment is the visible signal, but it is not the only one. US forces across the Middle East remain on heightened posture. Intelligence-sharing with Israel has intensified. And the Twelve-Day War demonstrated that the US is willing to strike Iranian nuclear sites directly—it bombed three of them in June 2025.
The message to Tehran is clear: make a deal, or we have other options.
Iran’s leadership understands this. They understand it because they lived through the Twelve-Day War. They watched their vaunted missile program described as a “toothless tiger” in global media. They watched Russia and China offer nothing more than symbolic support while American bombs landed on Iranian soil. The regime knows what a real American military campaign looks like. It saw one six months ago.
That memory is the strongest leverage Washington has. Stronger than sanctions. Stronger than carrier groups. The Iranians remember what happened the last time they miscalculated.
What Scripture Says
There is a psalm that reads like it was written for this news cycle.
“Why do the nations rage and the peoples plot in vain? The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together, against the LORD and against his Anointed, saying, ‘Let us burst their bonds apart and cast away their cords from us.’ He who sits in the heavens laughs; the Lord holds them in derision.” (Psalm 2:1-4)
Nations rage. Rulers plot. Military parades process through Tehran. Carrier strike groups park off the coast. Diplomats shuttle between rooms. Centrifuges spin in the mountain. Everyone is scheming. Everyone has a strategy.
And God laughs.
Not because suffering is funny. Not because the Iranian people’s agony is a joke. God laughs because the nations think they are in charge. The rulers take counsel together as if God were not in the room. Iran plots as if its nuclear program were beyond God’s reach. America deploys as if its carriers were the ultimate authority.
They are not.
The God who called Cyrus—a pagan Persian king—”my anointed” in Isaiah 45 is the same God watching Fordow today. He gave Cyrus a title reserved for the Messiah and used him to free Israel from exile. Cyrus didn’t know God. God used him anyway. That is what sovereignty looks like: a God who commandeers the plans of kings and bends them toward His own purposes, whether the kings cooperate or not.
Daniel served in the Persian court and recorded a vision of empires rising and falling like waves on a shore—Babylon, Persia, Greece, Rome—each one convinced of its own permanence, each one swept away. “He changes times and seasons; he deposes kings and raises up others” (Daniel 2:21). The Islamic Republic has been in power for 47 years. In the scope of Daniel’s vision, that is a breath.
Iran’s rulers believe their nuclear ambitions will secure their future. Scripture says otherwise. No weapon forged against God’s purposes has ever survived. Not Pharaoh’s chariots. Not Sennacherib’s army. Not Nebuchadnezzar’s furnace. Not the Persian Empire itself, which Daniel watched rise and fall while serving the God who outlasted it.
What This Means
Christians should pay attention to Iran—not because we need another reason to doomscroll, but because what happens in Tehran affects the global church, the geopolitical order, and the trajectory of a nation that God has been working in since Genesis.
This is not an abstraction. There are more than two million believers in Iran right now. House churches meet in secret. Pastors serve prison sentences for the crime of sharing the gospel in Farsi. Converts risk everything. And the pressure campaign that squeezes the regime also squeezes the people—including the saints.
A nuclear Iran threatens Israel—a nation central to God’s redemptive purposes. It threatens regional stability across the Middle East, where millions of Christians in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Egypt live under already precarious conditions. And it threatens to trigger an arms race that would put nuclear weapons in the hands of Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Egypt within a decade.
The stakes are not theoretical. They are measured in warheads and in souls.
How to pray:
- Pray for the negotiations—not that they produce a comfortable headline, but that God’s purposes prevail, whether through a deal or through its failure.
- Pray for the Iranian church. Two million believers under a regime that imprisons pastors and raids house churches. They need our intercession more than our commentary.
- Pray for the Iranian people. The sanctions and pressure campaigns hit ordinary families hardest. Pray for provision, for endurance, for the gospel to advance in the cracks of a crumbling system.
- Pray against nuclear escalation. Ask God to restrain the hands of men who would build weapons that could incinerate cities. Pray specifically against the weaponization program at Fordow and the warhead miniaturization work Khamenei authorized.
- Pray with the confidence of Psalm 2. The nations rage. God is not worried. Neither should we be—not because the situation isn’t dangerous, but because the God who sits in the heavens is not wringing His hands.
Iran is negotiating with one hand and enriching with the other. The United States is offering a deal with a warship parked outside the door. Netanyahu is drawing red lines. Turkey is maneuvering. The IRGC is posturing. Everyone has a plan.
But the counsel of the Lord—that will stand.
“The LORD brings the counsel of the nations to nothing; he frustrates the plans of the peoples. The counsel of the LORD stands forever, the plans of his heart to all generations.” (Psalm 33:10-11)
This article is a follow-up to 47 Years of Iran’s Islamic Revolution: What the Regime Celebrates and What the People Mourn. For our earlier coverage of the Iranian protests and the persecuted church, see Iran: Protests, Persecution, and the God Who Sees.
Sources: Behold Israel (Amir Tsarfati), Telegram; Arms Control Association; IAEA reports; NPR; Al Jazeera; CFR; FPRI. Nuclear data sourced from the Arms Control Association and IAEA assessments through February 2026.
