February 18, 2022
The nuclear talks in Vienna appear to have reached the crunch point with the Western states plus Russia and China having agreed on a text and now awaiting the response from Tehran.
It appears patience has run out and the other negotiators are telling Iran to agree to the document whose bits and pieces have been agreed to over the months, while Iran persists in dragging out the talks.
Reuters news agency summarized the agreed 20-page text in a story it distributed February 17. Iran denounced the text as a fake. But the other six countries did not.
The key points, according to Reuters:
- Citizens of Western states held by Iran will all be freed. Reuters said nothing about a prisoner “swap.”
- Iran will limit its uranium enrichment to 5 percent purity initially, above the 3.67 percent cap in the 2015 agreement.
- All the Iranian funds frozen in South Korea, believed to total more than $7 billion, will be unfrozen immediately.
- Only after those three steps have been completed will the United States begin to lift sanctions. Reuters did not say what sanctions would be lifted. The 2015 agreement required the US to lift all “nuclear” sanctions, but not those related to terrorism, human rights violations and other factors. Iran has been demanding that all sanctions be lifted, but on February 19, Foreign Minister Hossain Amir-Abdollahian demanded only that all nuclear sanctions be lifted.
- Iran will then cap enrichment at 3.67 percent.
- The text says that some matters remain unresolved, including Iran’s demand that the US guarantee it will never again withdraw from the agreement, as President Trump did in 2017. But the US cannot constitutionally make any such guarantee. Abdollahian suggested February 16 that Congress declare its support for the deal. But that wouldn’t guarantee a future president wouldn’t withdraw—and it risks having the deal rejected outright for lack of a congressional majority now.
The Reuters story was silent on how Iran could come back to the 2015 agreement when the work it has done in the last few years has placed its program far in advance of where it was in 2015.
The Reuters story was silent on key issues such as how many centrifuges of what type Iran could continue to operate and how long it would have to get rid of its large stocks of enriched uranium.
French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian declined to describe the agreement. But he did say that China and Russia accepted it along with the United States, Britain, France and Germany and that the six were only waiting to hear from Iran.
“We have arrived at the hour of truth,” Le Drian said. “It is not a question of weeks; it is a question of days. We have arrived at a point of convergence with the other countries.”
As framed by Le Drian, the issue now is whether Iran wishes to return to the agreement and accept limits on its nuclear work to get sanctions lifted, or prefers to keep conducting nuclear work and seeking to work around sanctions.
Ray Takeyh of the US Council on Foreign Relations, a private thinktank, wrote in Politico February 18 that Supreme Leader Ali Khamenehi and President Raisi both want to push ahead with Iran’s nuclear program and believe they can spike sanctions even if they continue long into the future.
Takeyh wrote: “The Biden team persists in believing that Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and President Ebrahim Raisi make the same cost-benefit-assessments they themselves are used to, and that fear of economic stagnation will cause [Iran] to yield on the nuclear issue. To be sure, Iran’s leaders do want sanctions lifted, but they are unwilling to concede much of their nuclear program to obtain relief. In this sense, we miscast Iran’s leaders by assuming they are driven by bottom lines….
“Khamenei’s plan to manage this is the resistance economy,” whereby Iran would wean itself from oil exports and rely instead on trade with regional states and China—the “eastern orientation,” which calls for cultivating close ties to China…. This plan is designed not to generate growth but to immunize Iran from Western economic pressures…. [Khamenei and Raisi] are unmoved by financial penalties or by the promise of economic relief.”
While resuming the 2015 deal would require Iran to stop the fast-paced enrichment and get rid of the enriched uranium it is now stockpiling, Iran would still have stockpiled knowledge about enrichment that cannot be rolled back. When restrictions start coming off in 2025, the Islamic Republic will start from a much more advanced position than it would have had Trump not changed everything.
Many in Europe and the US, therefore, want to keep the restrictions in place beyond 2025—something that Iran is understandably opposed to.
In Iran, there has been little discussion about the substance of the talks. Instead, since early January all anyone talks about is whether Iran should talk directly to the US negotiators or just continue exchanging documents, which slows the pace of the talks.
Oddly, this debate was prompted by Supreme Leader Ali Khamenehi. In a televised speech January 9, he mulled over the idea of direct talks, saying there wasn’t a firm ban on talking with the Americans.
The key point in his speech was: “Not surrendering to the enemies is one of the principles of the Islamic revolution. However, holding talks and negotiating with enemies at a certain juncture does not mean surrendering to them. We have never surrendered so far. And we never will.”
This kicked off a raucous public debate, with people discussing—or, more commonly, screaming—over the brilliance or stupidity of talking face-to-face with the Americans.
Both Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian and Ali Shamkhani, the secretary of the Supreme National Security Council, telegraphed their support for direct talks. Hardliners went into a frenzy and swiftly browbeat the pair. Both men then backtracked.
Khamenehi has remained silent.
But many media accounts indicate that, apart from the hardest of hardliners, most others are willing to see direct talks.
The United States has said it would welcome direct talks, but is not insisting on them. What US officials have reiterated repeatedly since early December is that he talks cannot go on endlessly without substantive progress. On January 13, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said, “We have, I think, a few weeks left to see if we can get back to mutual compliance.”
Another diplomat told reporters the time problem is exacerbated by Iran’s progress with nuclear technology. He said Iran’s nuclear advances “will become increasingly hard to reverse because they’re learning things, they’re doing new things, as a result of having broken out of their constraints under the agreement.”
In Washington, a dispute has infected the American negotiating team, which is headed by Robert Malley, who appears to have a great deal of patience. But others on his team seem to have run out of patience. Richard Nephew, who is Malley’s deputy, and two other unnamed members of the negotiating team, asked to be taken off the team and given other responsibilities in Washington. Nephew was the central figure in devising the sanctions program the Obama Administration used to throttle Iran starting in 2012.