WASHINGTON, June 7 -- The optimism was unmistakable. President Donald Trump, speaking in a pre-recorded interview aired Sunday on NBC News' Meet the Press, declared that the United States and Iran were within reach of an agreement to end their war, separated only by a handful of remaining differences.

"We are very close," Trump told moderator Kristen Welker, who conducted the interview Friday at a farm in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin. "We have a couple of points. They don't even seem like big points."

But the points, as he described them, were not small. What Trump wants - and what Iran has not yet agreed to - are stricter nuclear provisions that go beyond Tehran's reported concession that it will not pursue nuclear weapons. The president ...