The Iranian Nuclear Negotiation on the Brink – Pierre Haski
June 10, 2022 9:52 am
In a high-intensity negotiation, the last to surrender usually wins. The problem is that if no one gives in, then it goes towards insured failure. A similar moment is what we are experiencing with regard to the Iranian nuclear negotiation, now on the brink of the precipice.
You are forgiven if you have not followed the latest ups and downs of this interminable negotiation, the stakes of which are the possibility for Iran to dispose of the atomic weapon.
So a summary is a must: in 2015 Iran signed an agreement giving up its nuclear program in exchange for the cancellation of the sanctions against it. Optimism was widespread at the time. But in 2018 Donald Trump withdrew the United States from the deal, for the simple fact that it was one of the successes of his predecessor Barack Obama.
A foreign condition
Since then, the deal has struggled to survive until Joe Biden’s advent in 2021. The Democratic president wanted to resurrect the deal with Iran, but that’s where the matter got complicated.
After months of indirect negotiations in Vienna (because Americans and Iranians speak through the intermediary of the Europeans) a text has finally been agreed, ready for signature. The agreement allowed for the partial cancellation of US sanctions and a return of Iran to the 2015 mechanism.
There is a time when diplomacy reaches its limits and one enters unknown territory
But at the latest Tehran placed a condition that had no connection with the nuclear moment, namely that the United States excluded the guardians of the revolution, the army of mullahs, from the list of terrorist organizations. After Washington’s decline came a stalemate that lasted for weeks.
The problem is that in the meantime the nuclear program has restarted, in violation of the commitments taken. The centrifuges at full capacity and Iran is approaching the famous “threshold”, the moment in which a state is in a position to produce an atomic weapon.
Since then the tension has continued to rise, and today we are dangerously close to breaking point.
On 9 June Iran announced the deactivation of 27 cameras installed in the nuclear facilities of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the IAEA, a UN institution based in Vienna. The cameras sent by the surveillance system provided by the accordion.
The decision is a retaliation one day later that follows a resolution with which the AIE ver members condemned the maturities of the agreement by Tehran. The resolution was received very negatively in Iran, where President Ebrahim Raissi, a conservative on the national political scene, exclaimed: “Do you really believe that by adopting an IAEA resolution you will make us back down? In the name of god and of our great nation, we will not even step back ”.
And now? Now we are on the verge of bankruptcy, and one wonders if the war in Ukraine, with the dangerous game of Russia (a signatory of the agreement with Iran like China) is not further muddying the waters.
In the event of a rupture we can foresee extreme tensions in the region. The new alliance between and the Arab countries of the Gulf does not want an atomic Iran, and will be tempted to react. There is a time when diplomacy reaches its limits and one enters unknown territory. Today this moment seems dangerously close.
(Translation by Andrea Sparacino)
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