October 14, 2022
Nothing has happened to advance the nuclear talks with Iran since last March, according to Robert Malley, the senior State Department official dealing with Iran issues.
But officials of the Islamic Republic have been making almost daily statements during the last few weeks proclaiming great activity and progress in the negotiations seemingly part of an earnest regime effort to make it appear to the outside world that nothing has changed in Iran despite the protests.
In an interview with US National Public Radio October 6, Malley said, “There was a deal on the table … and all the other participants [Russia, China, Germany, France and Britain] were okay with it in March. Then again over the summer. Then again in August. And each time Iran has come up with some new requests, some new demands, most of the time either an unrealistic demand or one that was extraneous to the nuclear talks, something that had nothing to do with it.”
Malley was asked about Iran’s renewed demand for guarantees that the US will never again withdraw from the JCPOA and Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian’s recent comment: “The American side has taken some steps toward giving us guarantees. We just need those guarantees to become a little more complete.”
Malley responded, “We’ve told them since we started talking indirectly around March 2021 … we can’t control what the next president does…. That was the deal…. So, if that’s something that Iran insists upon, there’s no point in negotiating.”
Later that same day, State Department spokesman Vedant Patel added, “If Iran continues to take positions that it knows neither we nor our E3 partners can possibly accept, then things are going to continue on the current course. And this means strictly enforcing our sanctions and increasing Iran’s international isolationism. And the choice is ultimately theirs.”
Abdollahian has described Iran’s proposed changes to the text as an effort to address “a lot of ambiguities,” although it wasn’t until late September that Iran complained about vagueness in the text that dates from August 8.
Another major issue is the demand from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) that Iran provide clear and concrete answers to the IAEA’s questions about uranium residue found at three sites in Iran that the Islamic Republic never declared to the IAEA to be nuclear sites.
Tehran has asserted for months that it long ago provided all the answers that the IAEA needed and would go no further. But on September 25, Abdol-lahian said, “We are ready to provide answers to those [IAEA] questions.” The IAEA has not announced any new developments in the weeks since then.
