What to know about the tensions between Iran and the US before their third round of talks

MUSCAT, Oman (AP) — Iran and the United States will hold talks Saturday in Oman, their third round of negotiations over Tehran’s rapidly advancing nuclear program.

The talks follow a first round held in Muscat, Oman, where the two sides spoke face to face. They then met again in Rome last weekend before this scheduled meeting again in Muscat.

Trump has imposed new sanctions on Iran as part of his “maximum pressure” campaign targeting the country. He has repeatedly suggested military action against Iran remained a possibility, while emphasizing he still believed a new deal could be reached by writing a letter to Iran’s 85-year-old Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to jump start these talks.

Khamenei has warned Iran would respond to any attack with an attack of its own.

Here’s what to know about the letter, Iran’s nuclear program and the tensions that have stalked relations between Tehran and Washington since the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

Trump dispatched the letter to Khamenei on March 5, then gave a television interview the next day in which he acknowledged sending it. He said: “I’ve written them a letter saying, ‘I hope you’re going to negotiate because if we have to go in militarily, it’s going to be a terrible thing.’”

Since returning to the White House, the president has been pushing for talks while ratcheting up sanctions and suggesting a military strike by Israel or the U.S. could target Iranian nuclear sites.

A previous letter from Trump during his first term drew an angry retort from the supreme leader.

But Trump’s letters to North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in his first term led to face-to-face meetings, though no deals to limit Pyongyang’s atomic bombs and a missile program capable of reaching the continental U.S.

Oman, a sultanate on the eastern edge of the Arabian Peninsula, hosted the first round of talks between Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi and U.S. Mideast envoy Steve Witkoff. The two men met face to face after indirect talks and immediately agreed to this second round in Rome.

Witkoff later made a television appearance in which he suggested 3.67% enrichment for Iran could be something the countries could agree on. But that’s exactly the terms set by the 2015 nuclear deal struck under U.S. President Barack Obama, from which Trump unilaterally withdrew America.

Witkoff hours later issued a statement underlining something: “A deal with Iran will only be completed if it is a Trump deal.” Araghchi and Iranian officials have latched onto Witkoff’s comments in recent days as a sign that America was sending it mixed signals about the negotiations.

Yet the Rome talks ended up with the two sides agreeing to starting expert-level talks this Saturday. Analysts described that as a positive sign, though much likely remains to be agreed before reaching a tentative deal.

Iran has insisted for decades that its nuclear program is peaceful. However, its officials increasingly threaten to pursue a nuclear weapon. Iran now enriches uranium to near weapons-grade levels of 60%, the only country in the world without a nuclear weapons program to do so.

Under the original 2015 nuclear deal, Iran was allowed to enrich uranium up to 3.67% purity and to maintain a uranium stockpile of 300 kilograms (661 pounds). The last report by the International Atomic Energy Agency on Iran’s program put its stockpile at 8,294.4 kilograms (18,286 pounds) as it enriches a fraction of it to 60% purity.

U.S. intelligence agencies assess that Iran has yet to begin a weapons program, but has “undertaken activities that better position it to produce a nuclear device, if it chooses to do so.”

Ali Larijani, an adviser to Iran’s supreme leader, has warned in a televised interview that his country has the capability to build nuclear weapons, but it is not pursuing it and has no problem with the International Atomic Energy Agency’s inspections. However, he said if the U.S. or Israel were to attack Iran over the issue, the country would have no choice but to move toward nuclear weapon development.

“If you make a mistake regarding Iran’s nuclear issue, you will force Iran to take that path, because it must defend itself,” he said.

Iran was once one of the U.S.’s top allies in the Mideast under Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who purchased American military weapons and allowed CIA technicians to run secret listening posts monitoring the neighboring Soviet Union. The CIA had fomented a 1953 coup that cemented the shah’s rule.

But in January 1979, the shah, fatally ill with cancer, fled Iran as mass demonstrations swelled against his rule. The Islamic Revolution followed, led by Grand Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, and created Iran’s theocratic government.

Later that year, university students overran the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, seeking the shah’s extradition and sparking the 444-day hostage crisis that saw diplomatic relations between Iran and the U.S. severed. The Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s saw the U.S. back Saddam Hussein. The “Tanker War” during that conflict saw the U.S. launch a one-day assault that crippled Iran at sea, while the U.S. later shot down an Iranian commercial airliner that the American military said it mistook for a warplane.

Iran and the U.S. have see-sawed between enmity and grudging diplomacy in the years since, with relations peaking when Tehran made the 2015 nuclear deal with world powers. But Trump unilaterally withdrew America from the accord in 2018, sparking tensions in the Mideast that persist today.

Associated Press writer Amir Vahdat in Tehran, Iran, contributed to this report.

The Associated Press receives support for nuclear security coverage from the Carnegie Corporation of New York and Outrider Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

Additional AP coverage of the nuclear landscape: https://apnews.com/projects/the-new-nuclear-landscape/

President Donald Trump speaks with reporters during a swearing in ceremony for Dr. Mehmet Oz to be Administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, in the Oval Office of the White House, Friday, April 18, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)

FILE - In this photo released by the office of the Iranian supreme leader, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei waves to the crowd during a meeting with officials, Islamic countries' ambassador to Iran and a group of people in Tehran, Iran, March 31, 2025. (Office of the Iranian Supreme Leader via AP, File)

FILE - This combination image of pictures show President Donald Trump, left, addressing a joint session of Congress at the Capitol in Washington, March 4, 2025, and a handout of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei attending a ceremony in Tehran, Iran, March 8, 2025. (AP Photo/Ben Curtis - Office of the Iranian Supreme Leader via AP, File)

When NBC carried the Kentucky Derby for the first time in 2001, the broadcast lasted only 90 minutes.

On Saturday, when it carries the Run for the Roses for the 25th time, 90 minutes wouldn’t be enough for all the feature stories that will run leading up to post time.

NBC Sports will present 12 1/2 hours of coverage across two days on NBC, USA Network and Peacock. There will be five hours for Friday’s Kentucky Oaks on USA Network and Peacock. Saturday’s coverage begins on USA Network at noon ET before moving to NBC at 2:30 p.m. while Peacock will stream all 7 1/2 hours.

“So much has changed since we first started in 2001. At that time, we thought 90 minutes to cover a two-minute race. How are we going to fill all this time? Now we are still trying to figure out how we’re going to get this story in and that story in because there are so many great stories to tell,” said Donna Brothers, the only member of the broadcast team involved with all 25 Derbys on NBC.

NBC has done five hours of coverage on the main network on Derby Day since 2018. Sam Flood, the executive producer and president of NBC Sports Production, said the true evolution behind adding more hours while making the coverage appeal to a cross-section of viewers began after he produced his first Derby in 2006.

“I remember getting done with the show, which I think was two hours. I kept thinking, we can do so much more,” Flood said. “There are so many assets here that should be showcased, and that’s when we started blowing it out, adding more hours and slowly shifting more and more hours on to NBC and off the cable platforms.”

The expansion has also included the Kentucky Oaks. It started airing on Bravo in 2009 before moving to the NBC Sports Network and then USA Network.

The Derby broadcast has evolved into one of the most diverse sports events that NBC does yearly and is on par with the Olympics, which it carries once every two years, and the Super Bowl, which it has once every four years.

It also might be the only place where a viewer can see fashion, recipes from one of the hosts of Bravo’s “Top Chef,” and race predictions from NBC News chief data analyst Steve Kornacki.

Mike Tirico, the host of NBC’s coverage since 2017, said doing the Derby served as good preparation for hosting the Olympics as well as a stint as a guest host on the “Today” show last week.

“My time doing the Derby helped me to do the ‘Today’ show last week, not vice versa,” he said. “This show is so cool. It goes from speed figures to fascinators. It goes from betting to bourbon. We cover it all in the five hours with a great team of people who dive in and take their space and own it. We all build towards the race. The audience does the same.”

Tirico succeeded Tom Hammond as host. Hammond, a University of Kentucky graduate, was a guiding force around NBC’s early coverage and introducing the sport’s most prominent personalities to viewers.

Lindsay Schanzer, the supervising producer of NBC’s coverage, said one of the advantages of having nearly 4 1/2 hours leading up to post time at 6:57 p.m. ET is the chance to focus on the stories of the 20 horses that will line up in the starting gate.

Among the stories planned are the return of trainer Bob Baffert — who served a three-year suspension after Medina Spirit failed a drug test — 89-year-old trainer D. Wayne Lukas and Michael McCarthy, the trainer of prerace favorite Journalism, whose family was displaced from home in Southern California due to the wildfires.

Because of the many different topics in the broadcast, Schanzer has an interesting approach in how she books the coverage with what she calls a colors document, where each element of coverage has its own color.

“I like to look at it from a broad perspective to make sure there’s not too much of one color in one area, and every color is kind of represented across the show so that if you’re watching it, you’re getting a little bit of a taste of everything,” she said. “One color could be a fashion element, one could be Kornacki’s insights, one could be an interview with a horseman. I try to look at it in a holistic way like that.”

The approach has certainly worked. Last year’s broadcast averaged 16.7 million viewers, the largest Derby audience since 1989. That included an average minute audience of 714,000 streaming on Peacock.

Overall, 11 of the past 15 Derbies held in May have averaged at least 15 million.

“We’ve had all kinds of things happen (since 2001), and that’s what’s so unique about the sport, but specifically about the Derby,” said Jon Miller, NBC Sports president of acquisitions and partnerships. “You have 20 horses that come into that gate and long shots that can pull off the upset. You have favorites, you have great ownership stories, and you have legendary trainers. Who knows who is going to surprise this year? But that’s what’s great about it.”

AP horse racing: https://apnews.com/hub/horse-racing and Derby coverage: https://apnews.com/hub/kentucky-derby

Horses workout at Churchill Downs Wednesday, April 30, 2025, in Louisville, Ky. (AP Photo/Charlie Riedel)