The seventh round of negotiations on restoring the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran, convened today in Vienna. The U.S. delegation, led by Presidential envoy for Iran Robert Malley, won’t be meeting face to face with the Iranian delegation, but rather indirectly through mediators from the other parties, of the original P5 plus Germany, to the agreement.
However, there should be no doubt as to what Iran seeks to accomplish at the talks. Ali Bagheri Kani, Iran’s lead nuclear negotiator, laid out Iran’s objectives for the talks in an authoritative and unambiguous statement published as an op-ed yesterday in the Financial Times. Iran’s first goal, he said, “is to gain a full, guaranteed and verifiable removal of the sanctions that have been imposed on the Iranian people. Without this, the process will continue indefinitely. ‘Negotiations’ without an airtight solution benefit no one.
“The second is to facilitate the legal rights of the Iranian nation to benefit from peaceful nuclear knowledge, especially the all-important enrichment technology for industrial purposes, according to the terms of the international Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).” (https://www.ft.com/content/ecd4d7c1-f166-4263-a31c-93bcebccfd47)
Otherwise, Bagheri Kani went into some detail as to why there’s so little trust between the U.S. and its allies on the one side and Iran on the other. “Previous attempts to close the ‘trust gap’ between parties of the nuclear talks have failed mainly because the West regards any agreement solely as an established platform from which to launch more pressure against Iran,” he wrote.
