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Negotiators were due to start a new round of talks on Iran’s nuclear program in Vienna on Thursday in a bid to salvage the deal on Tehran’s nuclear ambitions.
For the first time since March, when negotiations to reintegrate the United States into the deal, which began in 2021, stalled, officials from world powers and Iran were set to meet in the Austrian capital.
In late June, Qatar hosted indirect talks between Tehran and Washington in hopes of restarting the process – but those talks failed to yield a breakthrough.
In a last-ditch effort, EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell presented a compromise proposal last month, urging the parties to adopt it to avoid a “dangerous nuclear crisis”.
Borrell said the draft text contained “hard-won compromises from all sides” and “detailed the lifting of sanctions and the nuclear steps needed to restore the 2015 pact.”
The UK, China, France, Germany, Iran, Russia and the United States signed the JCPOA in July 2015. Delegations from all will attend Thursday’s talks, but officials from the US and Iran are not expected to meet in person.
The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action aims to ensure the civilian nature of Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for a gradual lifting of sanctions.
But after the United States’ unilateral withdrawal in 2018 under former President Donald Trump and the re-imposition of US sanctions, Tehran has backtracked on its commitments.
Iran then exceeded the JCPOA’s uranium enrichment rate of 3.67 percent, rising to 20 percent in early 2021.
It then crossed an unprecedented 60 percent threshold, approaching the 90 percent required to make a bomb.
The head of the UN nuclear watchdog, Rafael Grossi, warned on Tuesday that the Iranian program was making “very, very rapid progress” and was “growing in ambition and capacity”.
– Cautious optimism –
Ahead of Thursday’s talks, officials expressed cautious optimism while warning that the parties were far apart on key issues.
The head of the US delegation, Rob Malley, and the head of the Tehran delegation, Ali Bagheri, said on Twitter ahead of the talks that they are coming in good faith but blaming each other for responsibility.
Analysts, meanwhile, said reviving the JCPOA remains the best option.
“The last thing the United States needs is a nuclear crisis with Iran that could easily escalate into a larger regional conflict,” Suzanne DiMaggio, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said in a statement.
Ellie Geranmayeh, an analyst at the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR), said that “at the end of the day, Tehran and Washington know the alternatives to a collapse of the JCPOA are dire.”
“This is unlikely to be a meeting that will resolve the outstanding issues,” but “it could provide the breakthrough needed to move the talks to a finish line rather than a collapse,” she said.
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