A senior Obama administration official insisted on Monday that the U.S. is being as tough as can be in the Iran nuclear talks, even though the talks are being led by a nice, cordial man named John Kerry.
“This is a very, very tough negotiation,” the unnamed official said when asked in Vienna whether the U.S. was tempted to cave to Iran’s demands. “I have sat in many meetings with Secretary Kerry.”
“He is a generous, wonderful human being, but he is tough as nails as a negotiator,” the official added, according to a transcript from the Vienna briefing. “And he is cordial. He’s respectful as a professional. He knows the material extraordinarily well.”
“And I think sometimes people see his affable, generous personality as giving,” he said. “Well, it is respectful and it is cordial, but he knows what is needed here. He is committed to the Lausanne parameters, and he is absolutely committed to getting them.”
Aside from going on about how decent Kerry is as a human being, the official had little to say about many of the key outstanding questions about the Iran deal.
The briefing was offered on the same that day criticism began to mount that officials were about to sign off on a deal that would exempt Iran from inspections of its military facilities, and would call for an immediate lifting of sanctions against Iran.
That, combined with word over the weekend that the talks would linger past the June 30 deadline, led a key GOP lawmaker to say the deal was now expected to be unacceptable.
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One reporter asked if the U.S. believed Iranians were backtracking from the framework deal reached earlier in the year. But the senior official dodged by saying negotiators are trying to reach a deal and aren’t paying attention to “voices” outside the room.
“What we have to do as negotiators is stay focused inside the room,” the official said. “We know what we agreed to in Lausanne. We know what we are trying to detail. If people have things they have to reconcile or deal with from those voices, then they’ll have to figure out the pathway toward that to make sure that we, in fact, fill out the Lausanne parameters that we agreed to.”
Another asked if the U.S. was worried that Iran is trying to change the framework deal reached earlier this year. The official answered by saying it’s “complicated.”
“Look, every one of these issues is very complicated. Lausanne was parameters. They were the broad outlines of what was necessary, but details can change the meaning of those parameters,” he said. “And so that’s why the negotiation is so complex and so difficult. And at the end of the day, we have to come to a common understanding of how the details are elaborated to fill out what we believe to be the Lausanne parameters. We think we are very clear about that.”
Officials did offer some insight as to how sanctions might be lifted against Iran as part of a final deal. The official said it could involve taking nuclear reduction steps, verifying those steps, and then coordinating the end of sanctions.
But the official declined to go much further than that, and would not go “detail by detail” through the deal as it stands now.
