Western negotiators have made “meaningful progress” in the latest round of discussions to rehabilitate the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, according to Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s team.
“The latest round of talks in Vienna were positive, and we saw meaningful progress,” a State Department spokesperson told the Washington Examiner. “Nevertheless, important differences remain, which still need to be addressed.”
Iranian and American officials have conducted several rounds of “indirect” talks in Vienna, mediated by the remaining signatories of the nuclear deal, about how both governments might return to compliance with the pact. Tehran sent mixed signals about the dialogue, by turns all but declaring victory in the negotiations while complaining about Biden’s refusal to lift sanctions unilaterally.
“We have taken the main big step, and the primary agreement has been reached,” Iranian President Hassan Rouhani said Thursday. “Three months ago, I was wondering whether we in this administration can do this, but we did break coronavirus and sanctions.”
RUSSIA BACKS ‘OUR IRANIAN FRIENDS’ AGAINST BIDEN IN NUCLEAR TALKS
Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif struck a more plaintive note, faulting Biden for refusing to lift at the outset the sanctions imposed by Trump’s team. “The fundamental change of approach, as a prerequisite for making Vienna talks successful, is the political decision that the U.S. president must make,” he said.
Rouhani said that the negotiators had agreed “to remove all main sanctions targeting the country’s oil, petrochemical, shipping and insurance sectors as well as the Central Bank of Iran,” according to a state media paraphrase of his comments.
“The U.S. position has always been that we are prepared to lift sanctions inconsistent with the JCPOA and the benefits it provided, but only in the context of a mutual return to compliance with the deal,” the State Department spokesperson said. “The precise nature of the sanctions-related steps that the United States would need to take to achieve this objective is a subject of the talks.”
Iranian officials want Biden to lift not only the sanctions renewed when Trump exited the Iran deal in 2018 but every other punitive measure imposed under separate legal bases. The Biden administration has resisted that demand but concedes that some of the Trump-era sanctions were “not legitimately” imposed.
“We have to consider a number of factors, including the reality that the Trump administration, as I said earlier, professed to be imposing these — this wall of sanctions in order to prevent a return to the JCPOA,” a senior State Department official told reporters in an April 21 update.
That statement was an apparent reference to the “wall of additional sanctions” that Foundation for Defense of Democracies Chief Executive Mark Dubowitz proposed in 2019 as a hedge against Trump’s eventual defeat in the 2020 elections.
“These sanctions would be directed not against the nuclear program but the regime’s role as the leading state sponsor of terrorism, including its terror-financing central bank; its missile program, which is progressing toward an intercontinental ballistic missile; and its human-rights abuses and corruption,” Dubowitz wrote in a Wall Street Journal column.
In public, at least, Tehran is maintaining a maximalist position. “Simultaneous with the Vienna meetings, the parliament emphasizes the policy of the Islamic Republic of Iran on the necessity for a real removal of all sanctions,” the Iranian parliament said this week, adding that “the parliament does not accept any division and categorization of sanctions that would lead to maintaining a part of the economic pressures.”
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Blinken’s team emphasized that the U.S. won’t take unilateral steps. “As we have said, any substantial move by the U.S. would have to be part of a process in which both sides take actions,” the State Department spokesperson said.
