Future of nuclear talks uncertain
THREE months after the last meeting to negotiate a revival of the nuclear agreement between Iran and world powers, it remains unclear if and when the talks in Vienna will restart, or who might represent Iran’s new government.
In the interim, Iran has continued to expand the quantity and quality of its uranium enrichment, leading some experts to conclude it is now even closer to possessing enough fissile material to build a bomb than the two or three months the US under President Joe Biden has publicly estimated.
At the same time, Iran has repeatedly sparred with the International Atomic Energy Agency over monitoring of its nuclear activities originally agreed in the 2015 deal.
For its part, the US administration has continued to warn that negotiating time is running out, without saying how much time is left or what it will do if it expires.
“We don’t have a timetable,” a senior State Department official said. “Our position is that we’re ready to go back” to the table, although “at some point, that won’t be possible any more, because their nuclear advances will become irreversible, and it simply will not be feasible to go back the deal” as it was initially negotiated.
Some answers may emerge this week, when the Tehran government says Iran’s new foreign minister, Hossein Amir-abdollahian, is to hold bilateral meetings with his counterparts from Britain, Germany and France at the annual UN General Assembly.
Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Saeed Khatibzadeh said that all were being told the Vienna talks would resume “in the next few weeks”.
In a prerecorded speech to the General Assembly later on Tuesday, President Ebrahim Raisi said Iran “considers useful the talks whose ultimate outcome is the lifting of all oppressive sanctions,” but gave no indication of when the Vienna negotiations should restart. Iran wants “effective interaction
with all of the countries of the world, especially with our neighbours,” he said. Raisi devoted much of his address to criticising the US and its sanctions policy, which he called a “new way of war with the rest of the world”. He repeated Iran’s insistence that nuclear weapons “have no place in our defence doctrine,” and are “forbidden” based on a religious decree by Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.
Speaking of Afghanistan, Raisi joined much of the rest of the world in calling on the Taliban to include others in their government. “If an inclusive government having an effective participation of all ethnicities shouldn’t emerge to run Afghanistan,” he said, “security will not be restored to the country. And like occupation, paternalism is also doomed to failure.”
Iran has no diplomatic relations with the US and has refused to speak with it directly at the Vienna talks, using the British, French and Germans as intermediaries. All four are original signers of the nuclear accord, along with China and Russia.
Robert Malley, the US administration’s special envoy to the talks and lead US negotiator, visited Moscow and Paris early this month to confirm that all of the signers remain on the same page in wanting to restart the deal under its original terms.
Former US president Donald Trump withdrew in 2018 from the agreement, under which Iran agreed to limit its nuclear activities and submit to international monitoring in exchange for a lifting of US and international economic sanctions. A year after Trump
reimposed sanctions, Iran restarted its high-level enrichment programme. Tehran has said its activities are for research, and that it has no intention of building a nuclear weapon.
Biden campaigned on a promise to negotiate a re-entry into the deal, but talks that began in April were suspended by Iran in June, after the June election of Raisi, a hard-line cleric. His government has said it will continue pursuing the restoration of the agreement, but has displayed little of the urgency that the previous reformist government attached to the effort.
In one sign that Iran may be in no hurry, the government has begun replacing the negotiators that headed its team in Vienna. Longtime Iranian negotiator Abbas Araghchi has been replaced as deputy foreign minister by
Ali Bagheri, a relative of Khamenei by marriage. But it is not clear even if the new government plans to leave negotiations in the hands of the foreign ministry, or transfer it to the National Security Council, more fully under Khamenei’s control.
US and European officials are concerned that Iran may backtrack on what was achieved during the first six rounds of talks. Negotiators believed they had reached tentative agreements on a list of sanctions that would be lifted and a possible sequence of actions each side would take to return to compliance. Raisi has said little about the negotiations, other than confirming Iran wants to return to the table, while insisting that it will not succumb to Western “pressure” and wants sanctions lifted.
Meanwhile, Iran has tried to expand its economic and security horizons to the East and within its own region. It has continued to fortify traditional allies, including Hezbollah in Lebanon, to which it recently sent shipments of diesel fuel, while also trying to bolster or repair ties with neighbouring Arab countries and other Asian nations.
Abbas Moghtadaei Khorasghani, deputy chairman of the National Security and Foreign Policy Commission in Iran’s parliament, said a linchpin of Iran’s new outlook was the Shanghai Co-operation Organization, a powerful bloc of Eurasian countries, led by China and Russia.
Iran was invited to be a full member of the organisation last week. “Hegemony and unilateralism are declining,” Raisi said to the bloc’s members at a recent summit in Tajikistan. Sanctions and “economic terrorism”, he said, were a threat to all of them.
Iran’s strategy to blunt the impact of US sanctions has also included stepping up outreach to Arab countries, such as Saudi Arabia, that are allied with the US, following years of abysmal relations that have destabilised the region.