After months of failure to revive the Iran nuclear deal, #EuropeanUnion negotiators drafted a “final” text for the #US and #Iran to sign.
An agreement seems more plausible, due to Iran backing down on initial demands for the U.S. to take the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps off its terrorist blacklist and for future U.S. presidents to not have the authority to pull out of the deal as the Trump administration did.
Tehran has refused to talk directly to the U.S. ever since former President Donald Trump pulled the U.S. out of the nuclear agreement four years ago and re-imposed crippling economic sanctions.
Tension rose between Iran and USA after an Iranian man was charged for an alleged assassination plot on multiple U.S. officials. “That doesn’t mean there needs to be a stop to diplomacy,” says Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.
On Monday, The EU officially circulated the final draft document to participants asking the U.S. and Iran to agree on it.
Western officials told POLITICO on Monday that they had finished negotiating technical questions that had remained open in the final draft text circulated by the European Union foreign policy chief Josep Borrell on July 21. The final draft determines the steps that Iran and the U.S. will have to take to return to full adherence with the original 2015 Iran nuclear deal, officially called the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action.
The deal rolled back U.S. and European sanctions against Iran in exchange for steps by Iran limiting its nuclear program and an agreement to allow intrusive inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency, the United Nations’s nuclear watchdog.
On Monday, The EU will officially circulate the final draft document to participants and will ask the U.S. and Iran to agree on it. If there is an agreement, foreign ministers are expected to return to Vienna to formally restore the 2015 nuclear accord.
The draft text will not solve the outstanding questions by the IAEA into the past nuclear program, the EU official explained. “It is a process between Iran and the Agency. There is no link between the two.”
The EU has been brokering on-again, off-again talks for 16 months between U.S. Special Envoy Robert Malley and his Iranian counterpart, Ali Bagheri Kani.
The last round of indirect talks between Washington and Tehran took place in Doha, Qatar, in late June. It ended without a major breakthrough.
Across the last five days, EU diplomats could be seen coursing between two different hotels all located along Vienna’s historic Ringstrasse, where the American and Iranian delegations are based, carrying folders with documents.
Iran has demanded that the UN nuclear watchdog close an investigation into the origins of multiple traces of man-made nuclear material that IAEA inspectors found at various sites in Iran during the past few years. Tehran insists that the nuclear deal can only be restored if this probe by the IAEA is closed once and for all.
The UN agency identified traces of uranium particles based on information uncovered by Israel’s Mossad in a secret 2018 operation. Israeli intelligence agents stole thousands of documents and CDs from a warehouse in Tehran that provided information on sites where nuclear activity may have taken place in Iran in past decades.
Western officials suspect that the uranium traces discovered by the IAEA are proof of Iran has had a secret nuclear weapons program and has actively worked on developing an atomic weapon until at least 2003.
Tehran continues to maintain that its nuclear program is solely for peaceful purposes. But, according to the IAEA, Iran has failed to provide credible and plausible answers to the origin of those uranium particles. This initiated the IAEA Board of Governors to censure Iran at its last meeting in Vienna in June. Western officials have been pressing Iran to provide answers and are not expected to back down from this demand.
One senior European diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive matter, gave one reason why Iran could be obstructing the IAEA probe: “The Iranian regime seems to prefer to protect some individuals involved in clandestine activities 20 years ago instead of freeing its economy and opening up the future for its people.”
In search of a solution, Western diplomats involved in the negotiations in Vienna said that over the past five days, parties negotiated a separate political deal with Iran that could help close the probe — provided Iran cooperates.
Another huge hurdle that has held up a final deal for many months involved Iran’s request to remove the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, a powerful branch of the Iranian military, from the U.S. Foreign Terrorist Organization list. President Joe Biden insisted that he would keep the IRGC under sanctions for now.
The terrorist designation was imposed by former President Donald Trump in 2019, in addition to numerous other terrorism and human-rights sanctions on Iranian institutions and individuals that are not related to the nuclear program.
According to a senior EU diplomat, Tehran has agreed to set aside the demand and to discuss the matter in the future in direct talks with Washington.
Iran has also demanded legal guarantees from the U.S. that it will not quit a future nuclear deal. The Biden administration has repeatedly stressed that it will uphold its obligations under the deal but that it cannot provide a guarantee for future administrations.
Negotiators have therefore worked out economic assurances that will provide Iran with the opportunity to profit financially from the deal — even if a new U.S. administration were to withdraw from the pact again. One such assurance that negotiators are working out is a temporary continuation of contracts for companies doing business in Iran.
A renewed agreement would enable Iran to sell its oil freely on global markets and regain access to its frozen assets, worth an estimated $100 billion.
While Iran did sell some of its oil — mostly to China — despite the sanctions, a revived nuclear pact would enable Iran to export about 1 million barrels per day above current exports, according to Henry Rome, a senior analyst with the Eurasia Group.
“If oil is trading at USD 100 per barrel, then that’s an additional USD 3 billion per month of revenue on top of existing exports,” Rome said.
Iranian politician Trita Parsi says responding to Democracy Now questions, “The Iranians have taken the proposal back to their capital. There seem to be greater divisions there than there are in Washington on this matter right now. The Iranians are very nervous because they feel that they were the ones who were duped the last time around. The deal only lasted two years before the U.S. pulled out. And if you remember the debate back then, all of the considerations and efforts and mechanisms that were put in place were there to make sure that the Iranians wouldn’t cheat, that they wouldn’t be pulling out of the agreement. There was nothing that was made in the eventuality of an American pullout. So the Iranians are very nervous.”