US President Joe Biden has increased pressure on Iran amid negotiations to resume the agreement establishing control mechanisms in Tehran’s nuclear program.
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said on Thursday (9) that if current policies related to Iran fail, Biden has already made it clear that the US will be prepared to adopt other options. White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki, for her part, also said the president had asked his team to be ready if the dialogue ended unsuccessfully.
“If diplomacy does not evolve soon and Iran’s nuclear program continues to accelerate,” warned Psaki, “we will have no choice but to take additional measures to further restrict Iran’s revenue-generating sectors.” The spokeswoman also highlighted that a diplomatic path has been proposed and that “this path remains open”.
The seventh round of talks began this Thursday in Vienna to save the 2015 pact, abandoned by former US President Donald Trump in 2018. Since then, Iran has broken the deal — the country claims it wants to enrich uranium just to civil use.
The talks, resumed last week after a five-month suspension over the election of hardline President Ebrahim Raisi in Iran, come amid widespread skepticism. Diplomats from Iran, the UK, China, Germany, Russia and France are present, but the talks are at heart indirect negotiations between Tehran and Washington, as the country refuses to sit at the table with a US emissary.
US special envoy to Iran, Robert Malley, told Al Jazeera TV Thursday that Washington is already prepared to negotiate directly. According to him, Tehran has not presented constructive proposals and even retreated on points with which it had previously agreed, in previous rounds.
State Department spokesman Ned Price said more time is needed to assess the Islamic Republic’s stance. “It will probably take a few more days before we get a sense of where the Iranians are in the context of this round’s resumption. […] and the flexibility they may or may not show.”
Price also sought to counter criticism that Iran was buying time with negotiations to advance its nuclear program. “We have been very clear that Iran will not be able to buy time, that nuclear advances and provocations will not have any further influence in these negotiations,” he said.
“The only thing these provocations and advances are going to do is bring us closer to a crisis. And we’re not looking for a crisis.”
In turn, the Iranian negotiator in Vienna, Ali Bagheri Kani, underlined that the country continues in the negotiations, based on its previous positions. “Iran is committed to reaching an agreement if the path is set,” he said after the resumption on Thursday. “The fact that all sides want negotiations to continue shows that all sides want to close the gaps.”
In an article published in leaf, Iran’s Foreign Minister, Hossein Amir-Abdullahian, argued that the US has been adopting extravagant positions, hindering the resumption of the agreement.
But as envoys participated in the sixth round of negotiations in Vienna last week, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) reported that Iran has begun enriching uranium with more efficient advanced centrifuges.
According to the agency, the country started to enrich uranium to 20% with 166 machines at the Fordow plant, embedded in a mountain. The 2015 deal does not allow Iran to enrich uranium there, a sign of how degraded the treaty is.
The new production is seen by Western negotiators as a way for Iran to gain an advantage in the talks. The country’s negotiating team has set demands that Americans and Europeans deem unrealistic, according to Western representatives. Iran is demanding the lifting of all sanctions imposed by the US and the European Union since 2017, including those unrelated to its nuclear program.
The suspension of these measures was provided for in the 2015 agreement in exchange for strict limits on Tehran’s nuclear program.
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