In the nuclear talks between Iran and six world powers, deadlines are really just guidelines.
Don’t expect that to change with the ultimate deadline approaching at the end of this month. Negotiators are already signaling that the talks are likely to go into July.
“We are not bound by time, but we are committed to this issue that a good agreement with details that are favorable to us is hammered out, even if it may take a long time,” Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi told reporters in Vienna, where negotiators have been working on a draft of a final agreement.
July 1 is the day international negotiators set for themselves to have a final deal in place limiting Iran’s nuclear program, replacing a November 2013 interim agreement that was supposed to last only six months.
But throughout the nearly two-year process, negotiators from the P5+1 countries — the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Russia and China — have shown more interest in making a deal and less in keeping to their deadlines. Though U.S. officials insist they will stick to it this time, diplomats from the other countries say it’s likely to slip.
“It’s very likely that we won’t have an agreement before the end of June or even after,” Gerard Araud, France’s ambassador in Washington, said last week. “We could have a sort of fuzzy end to the negotiations.”
In spite of a highly touted framework released April 2 after the last marathon round of brinksmanship slipped past its end-of-March deadline, key disputes remain that could torpedo a final deal.
Under the framework, Iran would essentially freeze its nuclear program for at least 10 years — except for a limited amount of uranium enrichment and research — and allow what has been described as unprecedented access for international inspectors charged with verifying the program is peaceful. In exchange, international sanctions that have damaged the country’s economy and isolated it from global financial markets would be lifted.
But the details left for later have eluded agreement, and deep divisions remain, particularly over Iran’s transparency responsibilities and the timing of sanctions relief. If those details cannot be resolved, it’s possible no deal will be reached at all.
French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said May 27 that it would be a deal-breaker if Iran denies access to military sites, backing up the International Atomic Energy Agency’s interpretation of Iran’s obligations. He was reacting to comments a week earlier by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, that ruled out such access.
Iranian transparency “is hugely important to all of us,” said Peter Westmacott, Britain’s ambassador in Washington. “We’re not going to let this issue disappear.”
A similar gap exists over sanctions relief, which Peter Wittig, Germany’s ambassador in Washington, said was not likely before the end of the year and even then not until the inspectors had certified that Iran that is implementing the deal. But Iran’s Araqchi, in Vienna, told reporters the lifting of sanctions had to be “simultaneous” with implementation of the deal.
“Some solutions have been proposed and we are working on them. For us, the principle of simultaneity is very important,” Araqchi said.
Many U.S. lawmakers, bolstered by public mistrust of Iran, would not mind if the talks fall apart. They believe that President Obama and his international partners have conceded too much to prevent the country from obtaining a nuclear weapon. Lawmakers will get a formal chance to review any deal once it is signed, under the terms of a bill signed into law by Obama last month, but the process is weighted in favor of allowing an agreement to go into effect.
But that attitude has negotiators worried. “I think the international community will be pretty reluctant, frankly, to contemplate a ratcheting up of sanctions” if the U.S. Congress is seen as responsible for a failure to reach agreement, Westmacott said.
He also noted that the entire global sanctions regime is likely to collapse unless it’s clear Iran is the party standing in the way of a deal.
And the actions of Arab gulf states that fear the deal will threaten their security might kill the most important goal of the talks — preventing nuclear proliferation in the Middle East — regardless of whether any deal is signed. Saudi Arabia has hinted that it could try to match Iran’s nuclear advances. Riyadh also has led other gulf states in a military intervention against Iranian-supported rebels in Yemen, sparking fears of a broader Sunni-Shiite sectarian war in the region.
Though new Saudi Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir described gulf leaders as “comfortable” with reassurances by Obama after a May 14 summit at Camp David, Sunni Arab states remain wary of the possibility that any deal may leave them open to Iranian imperial ambitions.
“It really doesn’t matter what Washington says. What matters is how people in the region see the developments,” said Efraim Inbar, director of the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies at Bar-Ilan University in Tel Aviv.
