Secretary of State John Kerry and Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif were meeting Saturday in Vienna to see if they could find common ground ahead of a self-imposed deadline next week for a deal limiting Iran’s nuclear program.
“We have a lot of hard work to do,” Kerry told reporters ahead of their meeting. We have some very tough issues, and I think we all look forward to getting down to the final effort here to see whether or not a deal is possible. I think that everybody would like to see an agreement, but we have to work through some difficult issues.”
Though negotiators from the United States and the other P5+1 nations — Britain, France, Germany, Russia and China — have reportedly made significant concessions to Iran since announcing a framework for a final deal on April 2, Iran’s stance has hardened in recent days. The framework essentially calls for Iran to significantly scale back their nuclear program for 10 years, verified by international inspections, in exchange for billions of dollars in sanctions relief.
Earlier this week, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, defined his country’s “major red lines” in the talks, including the immediate removal of all economic, financial and banking sanctions, and no “unconventional inspections” or inspections of military sites.
Those two conditions are possible deal-killers: The Obama administration has said sanctions relief must come after Iranian compliance, and neutral experts say such compliance would be impossible to verify without access to military sites.
There’s also a concern about whether Iran would be required to account for its past work on nuclear weapons. Tehran has been resisting this, but a concession on this point could cause problems for President Obama with Congress, which must vote on any deal.
Zarif told reporters in Vienna that “excessive demands” by the P5+1 could also sink the talks, and that Iran would not accept “exceptional procedures” in the inspection process.
