Representatives of the countries that are still members of the agreement – China, France, Germany, Russia, the United Kingdom and Iran – and the European Union met in Vienna several times this month to save the agreement. A US delegation, which left the treaty in 2018, was also in the Austrian capital for indirect talks with Iran.
Iranian President Hassan Rouhani said on Tuesday that “core talks have progressed about 60-70%, and if Americans act within the framework of honesty, we will achieve results in a short time,” according to the president’s official website.
However, the Iranians’ demands still do not conflict with what the US is prepared to offer. U.S. officials’ assessment of progress was more muted. They made clear that both parties still need to gain an understanding of the necessary steps for a full return to compliance with the agreement, formally called the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action.
“We have made some progress,” national security adviser Jake Sullivan told Christiane Amanpour, CNN, on Wednesday, describing talks in which U.S. partners told the Iranians “both the core restrictions they will have to accept and the sanctions easing that would result. flow. . ”
Although the joint commission for the JCPOA said on Tuesday that it had “decided to set up a third group of experts to investigate the possible sequence of the various measures,” Sullivan said on Wednesday that talks in Vienna were still focused on the content of the measures – – “what sanctions will be lifted and what nuclear restrictions Iran will embrace.”
A senior State Department official said Wednesday that the two parties are no longer looking at increasing, trust-building steps that either side can take.
“At this stage, the discussions taking place in Vienna are about full compliance for full compliance,” they said in a call with reporters. “I do not necessarily have to exclude anything, but I think at this stage the discussions that all participants are participating in are what the US will have to do to fully comply and what Iran will have to do to fully comply.”
“We are not going to accept the process in which the US acts first and remove all the sanctions they have committed before Iran does anything,” the State Department official added.
Iran has a ‘clear understanding’ of the sanctions that the US will impose
The official said after the last round of Vienna meetings that they believed Iran had a ‘clear understanding’ of what sanctions the US would lift and which sanctions it would not lift. The official does not want to set out these sanctions, but Biden’s government has said it maintains the right to keep sanctions in place linked to Iran’s support for proxy groups or terrorism in the region.
Tehran has repeatedly insisted that the US lift all Trump-era sanctions before ceasing to breach its obligations under the agreement. A senior Iranian official reiterated this position this week.
“All sanctions imposed during the Trump maximum-pressure campaign must be lifted,” they said. “We can not accept the categorization of sanctions.”
Iran also wants the US to provide an ‘objective guarantee’ that it will not withdraw from the nuclear deal if it rejoins, according to the Iranian official.
The senior official of the State Department suggested that both of these claims are not beginners.
“We have given Iran a number of examples of the kinds of sanctions that we believe we will have to lift to reconcile and the sanctions that we believe we will not have to lift and that we will not lift them as part of the return to compliance with the JCPOA, and then a third category, which are the difficult cases – difficult cases because it is a complicated process, but also because the Trump administration deliberately and deliberately imposed sanctions through terrorism labels and call for other labels, even though it was actually done with the aim of preventing or hindering a return to compliance with the JCPOA, ‘the official said.
“We have to go through every sanction to see if it was legally or not legally imposed,” the official added. U.S. officials have suggested in the past that they would hold sanctions related to Iran’s support for proxy groups or human rights violations.
On Iran’s call for a guarantee for future US engagement, the senior State Department official said that “it is clear that there is no guarantee.”
“It is a political concept in which, and it was clear during the JPCOA, that it is a sovereign right of all participants to decide whether they want to maintain their participation or not,” they said. “If the Biden government decides whether it will reach an agreement with Iran and the P5 + 1 to comply with the agreement again, it will be with the aim of acting in good faith and not leaving the agreement. . “