A cloud of uncertainty will hang over Vienna Monday morning when representatives of world powers and Iran meet around the negotiating table with the aim of returning to the 2015 nuclear deal. Ending months of diplomatic stagnation, the sides will try to bridge the gaps and grapple over Tehran's fundamental demand to lift all economic sanctions.
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The Iranians will insist on receiving assurances for any future understandings, a step mostly aimed at the United States after former President Donald Trump withdrew from the original deal in 2018. The new White House, under Democratic President Joe Biden, is trying to present itself as the polar opposite of Trump – a basic tenet of its foreign policy.
The new US president is entering talks from a position of weakness, without any significant foreign policy achievement under his belt and several resounding failures, chief among them the disheveled withdrawal from Afghanistan. The Iranians, for their part, are coming to the talks ready, experienced, highly motivated and certain that justice is on their side. They will not rush to any understandings until their demands are met. In the worst case, they will blame the West while continuing their dash toward a nuclear weapon.
The disagreement between the Iranians and the International Atomic Energy Agency could indicate the ayatollah regime's first course of action. A temporary agreement between Iran and the IAEA in February facilitated the maintenance of continuity of knowledge about Iran's nuclear activities. However, "We are close to the point where I would not be able to guarantee continuity of knowledge," IAEA chief Rafel Grossi warned last Wednesday.
The Americans are "talking tough" and repeating all the slogans in the arsenal, such as "other options" supposedly on the table, or the willingness to "respond harshly" – but the Iranians are still pushing ahead.
Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian and his deputy, Ali Bagheri, who will represent the ayatollah regime in Vienna, shuttled tirelessly between European capitals in recent weeks in an effort to sell their position, as their country applied selective pressure on the West through the limited use of proxy forces against American targets in the Middle East.
In a special op-ed that appeared in the Financial Times on Sunday, Bagheri wrote: "We have two goals: The first is to gain a full, guaranteed and verifiable removal of the sanctions that have been imposed on the Iranian people. Without this, the process will continue indefinitely. 'Negotiations' without an airtight solution benefit no one.
"The second is to facilitate the legal rights of the Iranian nation to benefit from peaceful nuclear knowledge, especially the all-important enrichment technology for industrial purposes, according to the terms of the international Non-Proliferation Treaty."
Israel can only watch this European concert from the sidelines again and sincerely hope for the best – and for assurances from Washington and the West. Yet herein lays the exact problem: Jerusalem, similar to 2015, is not a party to the talks, despite being the country that will seemingly be affected most by the results of the negotiations. Can our allies be trusted? This is the million-dollar question that will be answered in the coming days.
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