David S Cloud and Tracy Wilkinson -
With the first serious efforts to revive the Iran nuclear deal unfolding this week, President Biden faces an increasingly urgent dilemma: He can go slow, risking war and a collapse of talks, or move fast, even if it means a possibly flawed deal that damages his ambitious domestic agenda.
Iran, the US, the European Union and the five other nations that signed the 2015 nuclear pact, including China and Russia, will gather in Vienna starting on Tuesday in hopes of salvaging an agreement that the Trump administration set ablaze but that other world powers struggled to keep alive.
The new talks — the first public meetings involving all parties since former president Donald Trump withdrew from the deal in 2018 — are aimed at returning both the US and Tehran into compliance. Washington would ease sanctions that have crippled Iran’s economy, and the Islamic Republic would cut back production of nuclear materials, which it had increased to prohibited quantities. Until now, each side insisted the other go first, locking the two into a stalemate.
“This is a first step,” Biden’s special envoy for Iran issues who helped negotiate the 2015 pact, Robert Malley, said on Twitter. “Difficult discussions ahead but on the right path.”
But technical and, more important, political challenges remain for all parties that could easily scuttle any progress.
Some US officials and analysts think Biden should delay dealing with Iran, focusing on his domestic agenda instead. Others think he has already waited too long.
And some Pentagon officials think the tensions are so severe that it might not be possible to delay further. Without a deal restricting the Iranian nuclear programme, the choice becomes to watch Iran march closer to the ability to build a bomb, or to go to war to stop it, US military officials say.
As evidence of the urgency, the UN atomic watchdog agency’s latest report says Iran has installed a set of sophisticated centrifuges at its underground Natanz plant that will further expand its capability to enrich uranium.
The longer Iran is outside the deal, the closer it gets to having a nuclear weapon; the closer it gets, the more likely Israel is to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities, potentially setting off a regional war that would be almost certain to draw in the United States. Biden first made overtures to Iran in February, hoping to unlock the stalemate, but those were rebuffed.
In the weeks since, European diplomats led by Josep Borrell, foreign minister for the European Union, lobbied Iranians, Russians and others to agree to move past the initial objections. — dpa
Oman Observer is now on the WhatsApp channel. Click here
