Oil squeeze set to revive Iran deal
The release of British-Iranian detainees Nazanin ZaghariRatcliffe and Anoosheh Ashoori raises hope that recent efforts to revive the 2015 Iran nuclear accord may get “back on track,” says the Financial Times. Tehran and London have repeatedly denied a link, but the detainees’ families have long claimed they were being used as “political pawns” and Britain’s decision to return £400m for Chieftain tanks ordered by Iran (but never delivered) in the 1970s at a “critical point” in talks, seems “more than pure coincidence”. The deal, which eases sanctions on Iran in exchange for it giving up its ambitions to build a nuclear weapon, has faltered since the US, a signatory alongside the UK, France, Russia, China and Germany, pulled out in 2018 under the presidency of Donald Trump.
Russia has “complicated efforts to save the deal” because of sanctions imposed following its invasion of Ukraine, says David Hughes in the Evening Standard. Talks stalled last week, but on Tuesday, foreign minister Sergei Lavrov said Moscow’s demands had been satisfied. The revival of the deal could ease global oil prices by “bringing a major oil producer back into the market”.
Still, lifting sanctions would be highly unpopular in many quarters. It would “remove terrorist designations on individuals and organisations” and clear a path for sales of oil, which would then “bankroll” the country’s “missile development and terrorist proxies around the globe”, says Hugh Hewitt in The Washington Post. The “religious zealots of Tehran are in league with Putin and Russia’s state-owned Rosatom nuclear agency”, which will bank $10bn for building two of the permitted reactors. Putin will take his “cut”. This is“appeasement” and it “will not work”.