U.S. officials are insisting that Tuesday is a “real deadline” for reaching an agreement to roll back Iran’s nuclear program, but they also aren’t threatening to walk away from the talks if a deal isn’t struck by day’s end.
Tehran, the United States and five other countries involved in the negotiations missed their March 24 deadline to reach the outlines of a nuclear deal and now are involved in intense talks to try to hash out an agreement by March 31.
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With just a day left to meet the new deadline, the White House and State Department are still focused on reaching a deal but also are emphasizing that the interim agreement with Iran, known as the Joint Plan of Action, will still be in effect until the end of June.
That original agreement halted some aspects of the nuclear program in exchange for limited sanctions relief, and a missed March 31 deadline would not impact it in any way.
“So that remains until that time, in any event,” National Security Council spokeswoman Bernadette Meehan told the Washington Examiner.
State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf earlier Monday, however, stressed that the end of March is a “real deadline” and said its officials believe the next 24 hours will be critical.
“The choices the Iranians have to make don’t get any easier the longer they wait,” Harf said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” “So we have been very clear. We’re not going to take a bad deal. And we don’t know if we can get there in the next 24 hours.”
Asked if she is suggesting that the talks won’t get extended if there is no agreement by the end of Tuesday, Harf equivocated.
“I think if we can’t get to an understanding by the end of March 31st, which we said is a real deadline, we have to look at where we are,” she said. “And we have to look at what the path forward looks like when it comes to these talks.”
White House and State Department officials for weeks have laid the groundwork for all the legal details of an Iran deal to be finalized by the end of the June, when the Joint Plan formally comes to an end.
Only a political framework, they said, would need to get done by the end of this month, in theory giving them three more months to work out their differences before facing any serious repercussions.
But in the final hours of the self-imposed timeline, there have been signs that a deal on the political framework could slip once again. Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov left the Iranian talks in Switzerland Monday afternoon to return to Moscow, creating the impression that a deal was not imminent.
A Russian spokeswoman was quick to say that Lavrov could come back “as soon as needed” if a deal is close, but his departure only fueled a public perception that the two sides remain too far apart to ink the framework by the end Tuesday.
The New York Times also reported Monday that Tehran has backed away from a key provision in the deal — Tehran sending its enriched uranium stockpile to Russia for disposal — that the United States thought had been agreed to for months.
Enriched uranium can be used to make the core of a nuclear warhead, and Iran is reportedly now suggesting it would rather dilute its stocks to a level that would not be weapons grade rather than agreeing to send the stockpile abroad for destruction.
Harf on Monday said that there had never been an agreement regarding the shipping of the stockpile. She said the real goal is to reach a deal that limits Iran’s capacity to make a nuclear weapon within one year — in the event Tehran decides to buck the deal and reconstitute its nuclear program.
“This is still one of the outstanding issues,” she said. “What’s important to us is that we can get agreement about the path for them to basically get rid of a large part of their stockpile so that the remaining stockpile, when put together with the number of centrifuges, the type of centrifuges, all of the different parts of the equation, gets us to a year breakout time.”
Harf also appeared to downgrade the goal to be reached by midnight Tuesday Swiss time, calling that the deadline for hashing out an “understanding” rather than for reaching a political framework.
“If we can’t get to an understanding by tomorrow night, we have to look at the path forward and where we are,” she said. “But I would remind people that the JPOA, the conditions of it, were extended — at the — the last extension time until the end of June.
“So on April 1st, it’s not like something happens, right, because it’s already been extended until the end of June in terms of the JPOA, and it’s still being enforced,” Harf continued. “I just want to make that technical point. But obviously, we will have to look at where we are and see what it looks like, and make a decision.”
The Tuesday cutoff may, however, have teeth for Obama. As the deadline looms, critics have ratcheted up their attacks on the deal. Both Republican and Democratic lawmakers are threatening to impose new sanctions or pass a bill requiring that President Obama submit the details of a deal for Congress to approve or disapprove. So far the White House has succeeded in keeping any new Iran-related bill at bay until the end of March.
But if another deadline is missed, Congress would inevitably move to take up one of the measures when they return in mid-April.
