Iran negotiates as it advances its nuclear program
Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi announced Monday that reviving the agreement on his country’s nuclear program is linked to the International Atomic Energy Agency’s closure of the file of Iranian sites suspected of having witnessed unauthorized activities, with the negotiations between Tehran and major powers reaching critical stages.
The issue of previously finding traces of nuclear materials at three sites that Tehran did not claim to have witnessed such activities, raises tension between Iran on the one hand, and Western powers and the United Nations agency.
While Iran considers this file “political”, Western countries, particularly the United States, are calling on it to cooperate with the agency to put an end to these suspicions.
Raisi’s comments came while Tehran is studying the US response to proposals submitted by the Islamic Republic, in response to a “final” draft presented by the European Union with the aim of completing indirect talks between the two parties that began last year with the aim of reviving the 2015 agreement, from which Washington withdrew in 2018.
“On the issue of negotiations, the issue of guarantees (in reference to the issue of undeclared sites) is one of the core issues. All issues of guarantees must be resolved,” the Iranian president said.
“Without resolving the issues of guarantees, talking about the agreement is useless,” he added during a conference in Tehran in front of representatives of local and foreign media.
Over the past months, Iran has repeated its request to end the issue of the sites, especially after the IAEA’s Board of Governors issued in June a resolution condemning its lack of cooperation with the Director General of the Agency C in the case.
The move sparked sharp criticism from Iran, which responded by stopping work on a number of the IAEA’s surveillance cameras in some of its facilities.
Grossi had stressed in an interview with CNN last week that his authority would not close the file of undeclared sites in Iran for a political motive.
“The idea that we will stop doing our work out of a political motive is unacceptable to us,” he said, reiterating that Iran “has not yet provided us with the technically acceptable explanations that we need” to explain the issue of nuclear materials.
The agreement between Tehran and six major international powers, whose official name is the “Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action”, allowed the lifting of sanctions on the Islamic Republic in return for reducing its nuclear activities and ensuring the peace of its program.
However, the United States unilaterally withdrew from it during the era of its former president, Donald Trump, re-imposing sanctions on Iran, which responded by beginning to gradually retreat from most of its commitments.
Iran and the powers still affiliated with the agreement (France, Britain, Germany, Russia, and China) began discussions to revive it in April 2021, which were suspended for the first time in June of the same year. After its resumption in November, it was suspended again since mid-March, with points of disagreement remaining between Washington and Tehran, despite significant progress being made towards achieving the understanding.
The two parties, in coordination with the European Union, held indirect talks for two days in Doha in late June, which did not lead to any significant progress. On August 4, the talks resumed in Vienna with the indirect participation of the United States.
After four days of negotiations, the European Union confirmed that it had presented to the two main parties a “final” settlement formula.
Tehran initially presented its proposals to this text, and the United States responded to them last week. Tehran confirmed that it is studying this response before expressing its opinion to the European Union.
A report sent by Grossi to member states of the International Atomic Energy Agency on Monday showed that Iran had begun enriching uranium in one of the advanced centrifuges installed recently in an underground part of the Natanz plant (center).
President Joe Biden, who succeeded Trump in early 2021, expressed his intention to return his country to the agreement, on the condition that Iran returns to fully respecting its nuclear commitments.
Despite their conclusion of a joint agreement in 2015, relations between Washington and Tehran are still severed since the victory of the Islamic Revolution in 1979. The Islamic Republic considers the United States as the “Great Satan”, separated by an abyss of mistrust.
In response to a question about whether he was ready to meet his American counterpart on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly meetings next month in New York, Raisi reiterated his rejection, which he had previously announced in June 2021, days after his victory in the presidential elections.
Today, he added, “There is no point in a meeting between me and him (.) There are no plans for such a meeting, and there will be no” such plans.
Recently, the increasing talk about the possibility of reviving the nuclear agreement has been accompanied by a fierce Israeli campaign to dissuade its ally Washington and the West from doing so.
Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid announced on Sunday that this “diplomatic war” included the visit of the National Security Adviser and Defense Minister to Washington, to be followed by the head of the Mossad intelligence service in early September.
He stressed that his country seeks to make the “Americans and Europeans understand the dangers involved in the agreement,” considering that reaching a good agreement, from an Israeli perspective, would become possible if “the confirmed military threat (against Iran) is put on the table.”
Israel, Iran’s regional archenemy, has long expressed its opposition to the agreement on the grounds that it would not prevent Iran from developing an atomic weapon, an accusation Tehran has long denied.
For its part, Iran accuses Israel of being behind sabotage operations against its nuclear facilities and assassinations of its scientists.
Raisi stressed that these attempts did not succeed in “stopping” the nuclear program, warning that Israel might not have “enough time to act if it decided to take any military action” against Iran.
Raisi reiterated his country’s position not to seek atomic weapons, saying, “There is no place for nuclear weapons in our defense doctrine.”
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