“We don’t have months, we rather have weeks.” That was Enrique Mora, the EU envoy who coordinates the Vienna talks on the Iran nuclear deal, speaking as the seventh round broke up on December 17. Nobody at the table disputed his arithmetic.
The mechanics here are simple enough. The 2015 agreement traded limits on Iran’s nuclear work for relief from sanctions. Donald Trump took America out of it in May 2018, and Tehran answered by gradually going past the limits the pact set. Joe Biden has said he would rejoin if Iran returned to full compliance. The catch is who moves first. Talks that opened in April went on hold in June, after Iranians elected the hardliner Ebrahim Raisi, and they only resumed after a five-month gap, with the Americans taking part indirectly.
A new team, a tougher list
The delegation that came back to Vienna was not the one that left. Iran now insists that every U.S. sanction be lifted first, and that Washington guarantee no future administration will walk away again. The Atlantic Council described a team that arrived with “additional demands and fewer concessions” than its predecessors.
One senior State Department figure, speaking to analysts on December 4, was blunter. In his telling, Iran returned with proposals that took back compromises floated during the six earlier rounds, kept everything the other side had given, and then asked for more. That, he said, was not a serious plan for resuming mutual compliance.
Iran’s chief negotiator, Ali Bagheri-Kani, saw the week differently. He called the draft on lifting sanctions a “basis for serious, result-oriented talks” and said the pace of any deal depends on the “will of the other side.” Iranian state media, meanwhile, accused the E3 of playing “a negative and destructive role” to extract more concessions. France, Britain and Germany, for their part, noted “technical progress” but called the pause, made at Iran’s request, “disappointing.”
The clock and the cameras
Pressure came from two directions at once. A Biden administration official, unnamed, called Iran’s breakout time, the span needed to build a bomb if it chose to, “really short” and “alarming.” No figure was offered, though it had earlier been put at several months. National security adviser Jake Sullivan said Washington had told Iran of its alarm and that the talks were “not going well.”
Then there was the matter of the cameras. International Atomic Energy Agency chief Rafael Grossi said no understanding had been reached on a missing data-storage unit from a camera at the Karaj centrifuge-parts site, west of Tehran. Iran says a June attack, which it blames on Israel, damaged the equipment. Grossi was unconvinced. “We have doubts about that,” he said, adding that it was “very strange that it disappears.”
The IAEA’s latest assessment also found Fordow, the plant built underground, turning out uranium enriched to 20 percent. Pair that with the demand for sanctions relief up front and the Atlantic Council’s reading follows: an opening bargaining position, at best, or a sign the deal itself is dying, at worst.
No new date was set when delegates left. Mora said he hoped to reconvene in 2021, and China’s lead negotiator, Wan Qun, hoped for talks to resume “before the end of the year.”
Sources
- U.S. Says Iran's Nuclear Breakout Time Is 'Really Short' As Latest Vienna Talks Adjourn (RFE/RL)
- Vienna talks adjourn amid tensions between Iran, Europeans (Anadolu Agency)
- Iran offers less for more as Vienna talks stall (Atlantic Council)
