WASHINGTON – The United States on Thursday took a major step towards restoring the Iran nuclear deal that the Trump administration abandoned and offering to join the European nations in the first substantive diplomacy with Tehran in more than four years, officials from the Biden government said.
In a series of moves aimed at fulfilling one of President Biden’s most important campaign promises, the government has returned from an attempt by the Trump administration to restore the United Nations’ sanctions against Iran. This effort divided Washington from its European allies.
And at the same time, Foreign Minister Antony J. Blinken said in a call to European Foreign Ministers on Thursday morning that the United States will work with them to restore the nuclear deal with Iran in 2015, which he says’ An important achievement was multilateral diplomacy. ”
Hours later, Enrique Mora, the European Union’s Deputy Secretary – General for Political Affairs, called on the original signatories to the nuclear deal to save it from a critical moment.
“Intense talks with all participants and the US,” said Mr. Mora said said on Twitter. “I am prepared to invite them to an informal meeting to discuss the way forward.”
But it was unclear whether the Iranians would agree. The first obstacle to restoring the agreement could be a politically delicate dance of who goes first. And the Biden government has other goals that include expanding and deepening the agreement in an effort to suppress Iran’s growing missile capability and its continued support to terrorist groups and the Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad.
Mr. Biden has said he will only lift sanctions imposed by President Donald J. Trump if Iran returns to the limits for nuclear production it observed until 2019.
Under the original 2015 agreement, Iran sent 97 percent of its nuclear fuel out of the country and agreed to sharp limits on new production that would essentially ensure that it would take a year or more to produce enough material for one weapon. In return, world powers lifted international sanctions that stifled the Iranian economy. But when he took office, Mr. Trump unilaterally restored US sanctions, arguing that the agreement was flawed.
Iran has said that the United States is the first to violate the terms of the 2015 nuclear deal, and that it will only comply again after the US reverses the course and allows oil to do banking around the world. A senior Biden administration official said Thursday night that closing the gap would be a “careful” process.
The announcement will open what is likely to be a fine set of diplomatic offerings. A State Department official said the United States had no indication whether Iran would accept the offer, and warned that the prospect of a meeting was a first step in a long, difficult process to restore the nuclear deal.
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The offer comes days before a Sunday deadline, when Iran said it would prevent international inspectors from visiting black-declared nuclear facilities and conducting unannounced inspections at nuclear sites if the United States does not comply with the sanctions imposed by the Trump administration , do not lift.
Such inspections, commissioned by the Nuclear Power Agreement, are crucial to the international community’s understanding of Iran’s progress towards a weapons capability. The State Department official said Thursday’s offer was not specifically intended to prevent Iran from taking the step, as the United States would not offer a concession to prevent an action that would put Iran in the first place. grounds have not.
The official also did not provide details on what proposals the United States could bring for initial meetings with Iran and the Europeans.
The conversation about who moves first will only be the first of many obstacles. And with a presidential election just four months away in Iran, it was not clear whether the country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and the country’s political and military leadership would fully support the re-engagement with the United States.
A second senior official of the Biden government said the talks would take place if other world powers, including China and Russia, were involved. This left open the question of whether regional powers excluded in the last agreement – Saudi Arabia, Israel and the United Arab Emirates – would play any role.
The State Department said Iran should return to full compliance with the agreement – as the Biden government insisted – before the United States lift a number of US economic sanctions imposed by Trump against Tehran and the Iranian economy paralyzed.
Until then, and as a gesture of goodwill, the Biden government withdrew a demand last fall that the United Nations Security Council impose international sanctions on Iran for violating the original 2015 agreement that restricted its nuclear program.
Nearly every other nation has rejected the Trump administration’s insistence that the United States impose so-called snap-back sanctions because it was no longer part of the agreement.
In addition, the Biden administration is lifting travel restrictions for Iranian officials who want to enter the United States to attend UN meetings, the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity before the actions were announced.
Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said on Twitter that Tehran has been waiting for US and European officials to put an end to Trump’s legacy of #EconomicTerrorism against Iran. ‘
“We follow ACTION with action,” said Mr. Zarif tweeted.
Asked whether the United States has already had any preliminary diplomatic communications with Iran, the State Department official did not specifically answer, saying only that the government had consulted broadly on the subject.
European officials, who more than a year ago formally accused Tehran of violating the agreement by drafting and enriching nuclear fuel outside the limits of the agreement, were largely left to hold it together. In the hope that the agreement would be restored as soon as Mr. Trump has resigned, officials in Britain, France and Germany have delayed maintaining a dispute mechanism to punish Iran for repeatedly violating the agreement.