US And Israel Ramp Up Pressure On Iran As Diplomacy Stalls

Iran's top negotiator in nuclear talks said on Thursday that he had insisted Tehran was serious in the negotiations, underlining that Iran was continuing talks based on its previous positions.

The session ended in just one hour, which could be a sign that it was more of a formality and no real discussion took place.

"Iran underlined that it seriously continues the talks based on its previous position," Ali Bagheri Kani told reporters after talks resumed in Vienna.

"Iran is serious about reaching an agreement if the ground is paved …. The fact that all sides want the talks to continue shows that all parties want to narrow the gaps."

The United States and its three European allies, the United Kingdom, France and Germany, after last week’s round of talks were dismayed by Iran’s positions, saying that Tehran had retreated in agreements made earlier this year in six rounds of talks.

One point of contention is synchronization between the lifting of US sanctions and Iran’s return to its commitments under the 2015 nuclear deal, JCPOA. This was an important topic of negotiations in the first six rounds of talks from April to June. However, Iran is now demanding that the United States must lift all post-2018 sanctions at once, before it agrees to cancel escalatory nuclear steps it has been taking since 2019.

If Iran insists on its positions, it appears little progress can be made in Vienna, in what the British foreign minister had called Iran’s “last chance.”

US State Department Spokesman Ned Price said Wednesday that the “runway is getting very, very short for negotiation” and that if Iran was not in Vienna “in a substantive, a genuine, a constructive way" then the US would raise the “topic of discussion with [Israeli] Defense Minister [Benny] Gantz.” Israel has reportedly allocated $1.5 billion for an attack on Iran.

Reuters quoted an unnamed US official on Wednesday that Israeli and American defense chiefs would discuss possible joint military drills in case the nuclear talks fail, and political leaders decide to attack Iran’s nuclear infrastructure.

The US has been tightening sanctions. It sanctioned Tuesday nine Iranians – along with five Syrians and a Ugandan – as a prelude to a US ‘Summit for Democracy.’ The US announced Thursday it was next week sending a delegation, including the head of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, to the United Arab Emirates.

With reporting by Reuters

As talks in Austria to revive Iran’s 2015 nuclear deal resumed Thursday, Ali Bagheri Kani’s comments were reported by Fars News after his phone call with Ma Zhaoxu, China’s vice-foreign minister.

Zhao Lijian, a Chinese foreign ministry spokesman, said Tuesday that all parties should commit to serious negotiation to revive as soon as possible the 2015 deal, the JCPOA (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action).

Zhao said that as the party responsible for the crisis, the United States should lift ‘maximum pressure’ sanctions imposed on Iran after the US left the JCPOA in 2018, while Tehran should restrict its nuclear program, ramped up since 2019, to JCPOA limits.

An "informed source" Wednesday told Fars that Iran found China and Russia in agreement with Iran on the main points of proposals Tehran presented in Vienna last week. In a television interview Sunday, President Ebrahim Raisi (Raeesi) said Iran would return its atomic activities to JCPOA limits if Washington lifted the sanctions.

Bagheri Kani met with Sergei Ryabkov, Russian deputy foreign minister, in Moscow Tuesday. Russian President Vladimir Putin told a press conference Wednesday, after a video talk with US President Joe Biden, that Moscow would brief Iran on discussions with Washington, which takes part in the Vienna talks indirectly.

"We'll continue discussing this subject during the possible visit by the Iranian president to Russia early next year," Putin said.

Bagheri Kani arrived in Vienna Thursday for the second round of talks since Raisi became president in August, with immediate meetings scheduled with Russian and Chinese representatives and with Enrique Mora, the European Union official chairing the talks, which formally involve remaining JCPOA signatories China, France, Germany, Iran, Russia and the United Kingdom.

Short runway

After a phone call Wednesday with Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, Iran’s foreign minister, the EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell tweeted: “We need to advance much quicker in the negotiations to restore the deal.” Borrell wrote the call had been arranged at Amir-Abdollahian’s request.

In an article for the Russian daily Kommersant Tuesday,Amir-Abdollahian wrote that the ‘E3,’ who criticized the US for leaving the JCPOA but did little to counteract ‘maximum pressure,’ saw the US stance as unacceptable but were nonetheless following it.

The US State Department Spokesman Ned Price defended the US approach Wednesday by saying Russia and China should aim to “verifiably and permanently prevent Iran from ever obtaining a nuclear weapon." Price said the “runway is getting very, very short for negotiation” and that if Iran was not in Vienna “in a substantive, a genuine, a constructive way" then the US would raise the “topic of discussion with [Israeli] Defense Minister [Benny] Gantz.” Israel has reportedly allocated $1.5 billion for an attack on Iran.

The US has been tightening sanctions. It sanctioned Tuesday nine Iranians – along with five Syrians and a Ugandan – as a prelude to a US ‘Summit for Democracy.’ The US announced Thursday it was next week sending a delegation, including the head of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, to the United Arab Emirates.

The UAE is trying to reduce tensions with Iran, sending a senior official to Tehran for talks Monday. Iran was the Emirates’ fifth largest trade partner in the first nine months of 2021. ‘Maximum pressure’ sanctions empower the US administration to penalize any entity dealing with the Iranian financial sector.

The option could be exercised should diplomacy fail and if their nations' leaders request it, a senior US official has told Reuters.

The scheduled US talks with visiting Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz follow an October 25 briefing by Pentagon leaders to White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan on the full set of military options available to ensure that Iran would not be able to produce a nuclear weapon, the official said on Wednesday, speaking on condition of anonymity.

The US-Israeli preparations, which have not been previously reported, underscore Western concern about difficult nuclear talks with Iran that President Joe Biden had hoped would revive a 2015 nuclear deal abandoned by his predecessor, Donald Trump.

No results from talks

But US and European officials have voiced dismay after talks last week at sweeping demands by Iran's new, hardline government, heightening suspicions in the West that Iran is playing for time while advancing its nuclear program.

The US official declined to offer details on the potential military exercises.

"We're in this pickle because Iran's nuclear program is advancing to a point beyond which it has any conventional rationale," the official said, while still voicing hope for discussions.

Gantz, in a post on Twitter as he departed for the United States, said: "We will discuss possible modes of action to ensure the cessation of (Iran's) attempt to enter the nuclear sphere and broaden its activity in the region." He did not elaborate.

Israeli officials have been urging the Biden Administration not to accept a “bad deal” which would leave a path for Iran to acquire nuclear weapons in the future. Any agreement now means that Washington has to drop its most effective sanctions against Iran and there would be no second chance to get concession from Tehran.

Nuclear negotiations will resume on Thursday, according to the European Union official chairing the talks, and the US special envoy for Iran plans to join them over the weekend.

Iran has been enriching uranium to 20 and 60-percent purity, with the latter having no civilian use. As the talks drag on, the West and countries in the region are concerned that Tehran is getting closer to the critical point of a nuclear break-out.

The 2015 agreement gave Iran sanctions relief but imposed strict limits on its uranium enrichment activities, extending the time it would need to produce enough fissile material for a nuclear weapon, if it chose to, to at least a year from around two to three months. Most nuclear experts say that period is now considerably shorter.

Compromised

With the deal's nuclear benefits now badly compromised, some Western officials say there is little time left before the foundation of the deal is damaged beyond repair.

Such drills by the United States and Israel could address calls by Dennis Ross, a former senior US official and Middle East expert, and others to openly signal to Iran that the United States and Israel are still serious about preventing it from obtaining a nuclear weapon.

"Biden needs to disabuse Iran of the notion that Washington will not act militarily and will stop Israel from doing so," Ross wrote last month.

Ross even suggested the United States should perhaps signal a willingness to give the Israeli's the US military's bunker-busting Massive Ordnance Penetrator, a 30,000-pound bomb.

Asked about such remarks about deterrence, the senior US official said: "When President Biden says Iran will never get a nuclear weapon, I mean, he means it."

Central Intelligence Agency Director Bill Burns said on Monday that the CIA does not believe Iran's supreme leader has decided to take steps to weaponize a nuclear device but noted advances in its ability to enrich uranium, one pathway to the fissile material for a bomb.

Burns cautioned that, even if Iran decided to go ahead, it would still require a lot of work to weaponize that fissile material before attaching a nuclear weapon to a missile or other delivery system.

"But they're further along in their mastery of the nuclear fuel cycle and that's the kind of knowledge that is very difficult to sanction away or make disappear, as well," he said.

US officials have also long worried about America's ability to detect and destroy dispersed components of Iran's nuclear weaponization program once enough fissile material for a bomb were produced.

Exclusive report by Reuters

The talks seek to find a way for the United States and Iran to resume compliance with the agreement.

Then-President Donald Trump pulled the United States out of the deal in 2018 and reimposed U.S. sanctions, prompting Iran to start violating the nuclear restrictions about a year later. Iran struck the original deal with six major powers: Britain, China, France, Germany, Russia and the United States.

Enrique Mora, the senior European Union official chairing the talks, said on Twitter that they would resume on Thursday.

The talks have effectively been indirect negotiations between Iran and the United States, with diplomats from other nations shuttling between them because Tehran has refused face-to-face meetings with US officials.

Noting the EU statement that talks resume on Thursday, the State Department spokesman told reporters: "We understand that there will be a day of meetings before the heads of delegations need to attend...so Special Envoy Malley and his inter-agency delegation will plan to join the talks over the weekend."

Report by Reuters

Mostafa Alaei, a former senior Iranian diplomat, says reviving the 2015 nuclear deal will not solve all of Iran's problems with the West, while the failure of the previous round of talks between Iran and world powers has left a dramatic impact on Iran's ailing economy.

Alaei who was speaking to Etemad newspaper in Tehran on Wednesday said that "Iran's case is no longer a simple political or economic issue, it is a case impacting international security."

Iran should show flexibility

The former diplomat suggested that if the West offers concessions in the next round of talks in Vienna, Iran should show flexibility. "International negotiations are about give and take," he pointed out.

Alaei, who served in various positions at the Iranian Foreign Ministry and was a member of the Iranian delegation to the United Nations and Iran's ambassador to Venezuela, believes that "although the JCPOA [Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action] was an agreement made under pressure, it is still a brilliant document in Iran's political history."

He said Iran should have not allowed Iran-o-phobia to spread all over the world. Suggesting that what Iran needs at this point is a change to its approach in foreign policy, Alaei said, "It is wrong to think that we should always live under pressure. Sometimes we need to sacrifice the government's prestige to save national interests."

He further stressed: "We should come to know the true threats in our foreign policy, not the imaginary threats that are the products of illusion."

Next round of talks “fragile”

Meanwhile, another seasoned diplomat Fereidoun Majlesi said in an interview with Iran Diplomacy website, close to the Foreign Ministry, that the next round of talks starting in Vienna on Thursday is the most fragile round of the nuclear negotiations. However, Majlesi added that it is unlikely the talks would come to a halt.

"One cannot say with certainty that the next round of talks is going to fail like the previous round, but it is undoubtedly going to be the most fragile round of the nuclear talks because the Raisi administration is insisting on its suggested package which has already been ruled out by both Europeans and Americans," he reiterated.

We cannot deny the impact of sanctions

President Raisi and his administration deny the impact of a deadlock on the economy and their reaction to the falling value of the Iranian currency has been an unjustifiable punishment for businesses and the people. Majlesi said, "the government is denying the realities although it is well aware of the situation in the country. The outcome of this denial is that we should wait for another shock to the markets as a result of a possible failure of the next round of talks."

Majlesi stressed that "Like many other countries, Iran's economy is dependent on the US dollar. This has nothing to do with who is in power in Iran. The economy has been dependent on the rate of exchange for US dollar since the 1979 revolution and even before that. So, you cannot deny the impact of sanctions. Rising prices are not manipulated by domestic and foreign enemies as Iranian politicians say. You cannot justify it with the illusion of a conspiracy. This is a reality that leaves its impact on the people's livelihood."

Majlesi further warned that denying the problem will not serve Raisi's interests as the gap between his administration and the people will further widen because of this denial.

Counting on Russia

Speaking about upcoming talks, Majlesi said: "Iranian negotiators' new suggestions that undermined the outcomes of negotiations [Nov. 29-Dec. 3] have practically put an end to dialogue. The next round of the talks is going to start in a non-constructive and negative atmosphere.

Majlesi warned that "Iran is not powerful enough to change the rhetoric and agenda of the negotiations. He pointed out that Iran is counting on Russia's role as a mediator. But the strong coherence among Western negotiators will force Russia and China to follow the westerners' lead. This raises the likelihood of the collapse of the next round of talks.

"On the other hand, like all other countries, Russia's main concern is to serve its own interests and Iran's reliance on Moscow will increase Russia's influence and power in Vienna so that it might want to take advantage of the Iran card in front of US and European sides particularly given the developments in Ukraine.