Senior diplomats from the United Kingdom, France and Germany stated on Monday (December 13) that the major powers and Iran have not yet discussed the topic of the negotiations to save the 2015 nuclear agreement, and that the agreement will soon become a “shell” without progress.
“As of now, we are still unable to start real negotiations,” said diplomats from the so-called E3 in a statement on the Vienna nuclear negotiations as they shuttled between US and Iranian officials.
“Time is running out. If there is no rapid progress, given the rapid advancement of Iran’s nuclear program, the JCPOA will soon become an empty shell,” they added, referring to the agreement, which is called the Joint Comprehensive Action Plan.
The statement made a pessimistic assessment of Iran’s efforts to revive Iran’s restrictions on its nuclear program in exchange for an agreement to lift economic sanctions from the United States, the European Union and the United Nations.
The then Republican President Donald Trump in 2018 withdrew the United States from the agreement and re-imposed US sanctions, prompting Iran to begin violating its nuclear restrictions in 2019.
His successor, Democrat Joe Biden, seeks to jointly abide by the agreement through indirect talks with Iran, in which officials from other parties to the agreement shuttle between them because Tehran refuses to meet with US officials directly.
The other countries in the agreement are Britain, China, France, Germany and Russia.
Diplomats stated that they had made significant progress in the six rounds of negotiations between April and June, and the negotiations were suspended for five months after the hard-line clergyman Ibrahim Raisi was elected President of Iran.
A senior US official stated that in the seventh round of negotiations that began on November 29, Iran abandoned any compromises it had made in the first six rounds, included the compromises of other countries, and demanded more.
“We are wasting precious time to deal with new Iranian positions that are inconsistent with or exceed JCPoA,” the E3 diplomat said in a statement.
They added: “This is frustrating because the outline of a comprehensive and fair agreement to remove all JCPoA-related sanctions is clearly visible and has been so since last summer.”
