Iran sceptical about nuclear pact negotiations
The US and Iran appeared to be reaching common ground on the return of the nuclear deal. Multiple talks at different negotiating tables over the past few months offered some glimmer of hope for a return to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) agreement.
However, negotiations appear to have taken a step backwards on this issue after Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian claimed that Washington was "imposing new conditions" to restore the nuclear deal. “On the issue of lifting sanctions, they (the Americans) are interested in proposing and imposing new conditions outside the negotiations," he said.
The minister declared that "in the last two or three weeks, the US side has made excessive demands that contradict some paragraphs of the text", so that what has been achieved so far at the negotiating tables could be cut short. In this vein, the Shia-majority country has been involved in direct meetings with France, Germany, Britain, Russia and China for a year. In the case of the US, meetings have been held "indirectly" in capitals such as Vienna, where the European Union has tried to lead the resumption of the nuclear agreement with Tehran.
In this regard, Washington decided to "slightly" lift a series of sanctions related to civilian activities in Iran. A gesture that was interpreted positively by the Iranian foreign minister, but which was far from sufficient.
Now these small steps appear to have stalled following new US demands, demands that have not been made public. "The Americans keep talking about the need for direct negotiations, but we have not seen the benefit of direct talks with the United States", said Abdollahian.
What does remain are the red lines defended by Iran. This was reaffirmed by Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi, who declared that Tehran will not give up its right to develop a nuclear industry "for peaceful purposes", something that all parties involved in the 2015 pact "must respect".
This message was delivered by Raisi himself in a speech on the occasion of Iran's Nuclear Technology Day. In it, the Iranian president said that "for more than the hundredth time, our message from Tehran to Vienna is that we will not back down on the nuclear rights of the Iranian people... not one iota".
In addition, Iranian and Western sources have told Reuters that the United States is considering removing Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps from its list of foreign terrorist organisations in exchange for Iranian assurances of control over the elite corps' force and abuses. For the time being, however, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard remains on the US blacklist.
Thus, a senior Biden administration official stated that Washington does not intend to remove the group from the terrorist list for the time being. However, it appears that one of Tehran's conditions was to stop listing the Revolutionary Guard as a terrorist group. Meanwhile, the Iranian news agency Tasnim has issued a statement signed by 250 MPs out of 290 that "the United States should give legal guarantees, approved by Congress, not to leave the pact again".
The statement added that "the United States should not be able to use pretexts to activate the recovery mechanism", which would mean that sanctions against Tehran would be reactivated immediately.
The United States left the nuclear deal in 2018, during Donald Trump's presidency. For the former Republican president, the reasons that led the US to leave the agreement were related to "the bad deal" that the pact entailed. Trump declared that "even if Iran complies with everything, the regime would be on the verge of obtaining nuclear weapons in a short period of time". We cannot avoid an Iranian nuclear bomb under this decadent and deteriorated agreement", he assured, while branding the Persian country as a "sponsor of terrorism".
