Iranian officials have stymied yet another Western effort to jump-start nuclear negotiations, a delay drawing public criticism from Russia as U.S. and Israeli officials contemplate military intervention.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s team made an ominous public appeal for Iran to return to Vienna for the seventh round of negotiations over the renewal of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, which collapsed after former President Donald Trump’s withdrawal of the United States in 2018. That message coincided with a high-profile huddle between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, just as a European Union envoy traveled to Tehran for talks that produced a disappointing result from the perspective of Brussels and Washington.
“They are not yet ready for engaging in Vienna,” a senior European Union official told reporters, adding Iran seems to have “absolutely decided to go back to Vienna and to end the negotiations.”
Even that expected step is subject to delay, according to the official, who revealed that Iran proposed an intermediate meeting in Brussels, the home of the European Union headquarters, focused on “clarifying even more the situation for a final destination.” France and Germany have remained party to the 2015 deal alongside the United Kingdom, which was part of the EU when the deal was struck and has coordinated with the two countries on the Iran nuclear file despite its withdrawal from the union.
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A senior envoy from Russia, who also agreed to the 2015 nuclear deal and has cooperated with Iran during the Syrian civil war, criticized Iran’s slow pace.
“Isn’t it more prudent to discuss the texts with participants in the [Vienna talks]?” Russian Ambassador Mikhail Ulyanov, Moscow’s top representative in Vienna, wrote on Twitter.
Isn’t it more prudent to discuss the texts with participants in the #ViennaTalks? https://t.co/rZCnERVVcA
— Mikhail Ulyanov (@Amb_Ulyanov) October 15, 2021
That delay dovetails with Israeli assessments that Iran is not interested in a serious negotiation to curtail the regime’s nuclear program.
“I frankly think that even if they go back to the negotiations, they do not have the intention of going back to the negotiations with the intention of seeking a deal,” a senior Israeli official told the Washington Examiner and other reporters this week. “And if something happens in the course of negotiations, it will take a long, long time.”
That’s a problem for U.S. and allied officials who have alarmingly monitored Iran’s burgeoning nuclear program.
“Iran is becoming a nuclear threshold country,” Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid said Wednesday at the State Department. “Secretary of State Blinken and I are sons of Holocaust survivors. We know there are moments when nations must use force to protect the world from evil. If a terror regime is going to acquire a nuclear weapon, we must act.”
Yet, a recently retired Israeli spy chief implied Mossad has succeeded in postponing Iran’s nuclear breakout.
“I think that at the end of the day, Iran is not close to reaching any nuclear weapons,” former Mossad director Yossi Cohen, who retired in June after leading the agency since 2016, told a conference in Jerusalem. “It is no closer than before, and that’s thanks to the great effort we made.”
That assessment does not contradict Lapid, who identified a different state of development — the point at which Iran can race to a nuclear weapon as the key juncture — as the Rubicon that Israeli officials can’t allow officials in Tehran to cross. Otherwise, they’d reach a so-called “zone of immunity” that would allow their nuclear program to survive a last-ditch military strike.
“The zone of immunity, as it’s called, may be different for the United States than it is for Israel, based on military capabilities,” the Foundation for Defense of Democracies senior fellow Richard Goldberg, who worked on Iran nuclear issues at the White House National Security Council during Trump’s presidency, told the Washington Examiner. “They’re signaling that they have a lower threshold for Iranian capabilities and advancement that could trigger their red line for military action than the United States, potentially. And one assumes that’s based on [different] military capabilities.”
The widespread misgivings about Iran’s willingness to negotiate in good faith, combined with the ongoing progress by the regime’s nuclear weapons developers, could make the prospect even of additional negotiations a dangerous one, from the Israeli perspective.
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“It’s a strategic dilemma,” the senior Israeli official said. “They want to drag their feet, get more time, have at least partial lifting of sanctions … There is a point of time in which the developments of the politics in the Middle East and things that happen in this universe converge.”
