World powers and Iran will gather in Vienna on Monday (November 29) to try to save their 2015 nuclear agreement, but as Tehran insists on a hard line, Western powers are becoming more frustrated, and the hope of a breakthrough seems slim.
Diplomats said that time is running out to restore the agreement. The then U.S. President Donald Trump abandoned the agreement in 2018, which angered Iran and made other relevant powers-Britain, China, France, Germany. And Russia is frustrated.
Six rounds of indirect talks were held from April to June. The new round of elections started after the interruption caused by the election of Iran’s new President Ebrahim Raisi, a hardline clergyman.
Western diplomats say that Tehran’s new negotiating team has made some demands that American and European diplomats consider unrealistic.
This includes insisting on lifting all sanctions imposed by the United States and the European Union since 2017, including sanctions unrelated to Iran’s nuclear program.
At the same time, the conflict between Tehran and the UN Atomic Energy Supervisory Agency, which oversees nuclear programs, has worsened.
Iran has been advancing its uranium enrichment program, and the International Atomic Energy Agency stated that its inspectors have been treated roughly and refused to reinstall surveillance cameras in locations that it deems essential to the resumption of transactions.
“If Iran thinks it can use this time to build more influence, and then comes back and says they want something better, it simply won’t work. We and our partners won’t do this,” the US envoy Robert S. Marley told BBC Sounds on Saturday.
He warned that if negotiations break down, Washington will be prepared to increase pressure on Tehran.
Iranian officials insisted before Monday that their focus was purely on lifting sanctions, not on the nuclear issue. It is emphasized that its 40-person delegation mainly includes economic officials.
“In order to ensure that any upcoming agreement is ironclad, the West needs to pay the price for failing to comply with its agreement. Like any industry, a transaction is a transaction, and disrupting it will have consequences,” Iran’s top nuclear negotiator Ali Bagheri Carney said in a provocative column in the Financial Times on Sunday.
“The principle of’mutual compliance’ cannot be an appropriate basis for negotiations, because the US government unilaterally withdrew from the deal.”
Diplomats said that Washington suggested negotiating an open-ended provisional agreement with Tehran, as long as no permanent agreement was reached.
Failure to reach an agreement may also trigger a reaction from Israel, which has stated that military options will be on the table.
“Negotiations cannot go on forever. Obviously the process needs to be accelerated,” Moscow special envoy Mikhail Ulyanov said on Twitter.
