Further production and export expansion, however, will require more foreign investment.

The new wave of agreements with Iran, most of which remain provisional, began on Nov. 8, the day of Mr. Trump’s victory, when Total, a French company, became the first Western energy company to negotiate a deal to develop and produce natural gas from a section of a giant Persian Gulf gas field. Total leads a consortium that includes the China National Petroleum Corporation and Petropars, a subsidiary of the Iranian state-run oil company, in the $4.8 billion project. The provisional agreement is expected to be completed early next year.

“They are signing before Trump does something,” said Dragan Vuckovic, president of Mediterranean International, a Texas-based oil services company that works in North Africa and the Middle East. “The Iranians will give the Europeans favorable terms because of Trump. They want to send a message to Trump that if you try to cancel this agreement, we will just go to the Europeans.”

Iran needs foreign capital and technical expertise to reach its immediate goal of returning to its 2011 oil production level of 4.3 million barrels a day, reversing a drop that began even before sanctions were imposed. Many Iranian fields are old and in decline, requiring sophisticated and expensive redrilling of wells and injections of water and carbon dioxide to coax more oil from the ground.

Since oil export sanctions were lifted, Iran’s production has risen almost a third, to about 3.7 million barrels a day, with minimal foreign help. By reaching agreements with Total and Shell, Tehran now has the ambitious goal of reaching production levels of 4.8 million barrels a day by 2021, which would give it added clout in OPEC and the ability to go head-to-head with Saudi Arabia in competing for growing Asian markets, particularly in India.

In past decades, Iran has been aggressive in urging other OPEC members to use their position to manipulate the market for higher prices, while Saudi Arabia has often argued for caution. Saudi Arabia has held the upper hand in recent years, but Iran was a major player at the latest OPEC meeting, as the cartel decided to cut production for the first time in eight years.

Iran wants to ramp up production at the very moment that Saudi Arabia wants to cut output to lift prices. Using its recovered production leverage, Iran agreed to go along with the decision to collectively cut 1.2 million barrels a day of production only when the other members conceded to its demands that it be allowed to increase production by about 90,000 barrels a day next year.

It remains to be seen whether the agreement to scale back production, not slated to take effect until January, will hold up. Similar agreements among OPEC members in the past have crumbled in the face of widespread cheating and a lack of an enforcement mechanism. The agreement is also contingent on cooperation from a handful of non-OPEC producers, particularly Russia, which is notoriously unreliable in such matters, said Philip K. Verleger Jr., an energy economist who served in the Ford and Carter administrations.