Iran will send a delegation to Vienna to restart nuclear talks

Following a meeting with his Syrian counterpart, Faisal Mekdad, in the Persian capital of Tehran, Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian has announced that a national delegation will soon travel to Vienna. "We plan to send a delegation to Vienna to restart talks and strengthen cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency [IAEA]," the Foreign Minister said during a press conference.  

"There is a consensus between Mohamed Eslami [the head of Iran's nuclear programme] and Mr Grossi [director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency]; so we hope that they will focus on the issues agreed during the last few days, resolving the accusations made by the [UN nuclear] agency against Iran, in order to pass this stage on the path of technical cooperation," Amir-Abdollahian added, also stating that the delegation hopes to meet with the EU's high representative for foreign affairs and security policy, Josep Borrell, to discuss the reactivation of the nuclear pact. 

However, several voices within the agreement itself (which comprises the 5+1 group; Germany, China, France, the United Kingdom and Russia, and the United States, which participates in the talks indirectly after its unilateral exit in 2018) have made public their mistrust of a possible reactivation of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). 

The nuclear deal "has no future and does not correspond to reality", said the secretary general of the German Free Democratic Party (FDP), a member of the coalition government, in a conversation with GMX News. To take it back would mean "negotiating with an inhumane regime, which is completely rejected by its own people and has no legitimacy whatsoever". 

For its part, the US has also said that the nuclear deal is not among the White House's priorities. "Really, [reviving the deal] is not our priority today," said Washington's special envoy to Iran, Robert Malley. "We're not going to focus on something that is inert when there are a lot of other things going on," the US official said, referring to Tehran's entry "into a European war" through the dispatch of drones, as well as the protests the country has been facing for nearly seven weeks. 

"That's why we are not focused on that: because nothing is happening as far as the nuclear deal is concerned. We are not going to waste our time [...]. We will spend our time where we can be useful," Malley concluded, in line with what Ned Price, spokesman for the US State Department, had already said a few weeks earlier: the agreement "is not imminent" because the demands made by Tehran last August "are not realistic". 

Moreover, speaking at an event organised by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Malley said that the US government would not apologise for "trying to do everything possible to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon". This warning was reinforced after Saudi Arabian intelligence informed Washington - as reported in the Wall Street Journal - of an imminent Iranian attack on targets in the Wahhabi kingdom. 

"We are concerned about the [Iranian] threat landscape and are in constant contact with the Saudis through military and intelligence channels," said National Security Council spokesman John Kirby. "We will not hesitate to act in defence of our interests and those of our partners in the region." 

Negotiations on the nuclear deal have been at an impasse since the Islamic Republic requested - late this summer, when everything pointed to the 2015 pact being revived - an end to IAEA investigations into traces of uranium found at undeclared sites by Tehran. A key point for the negotiations between the 5+1 group, the EU and Iran, which the other members of the agreement did not accept. 

Thus, once again, efforts to resume the 2015 agreement - unilaterally abandoned by Donald Trump in 2018 - seem to have stalled again, while relations between Iran and the other powers are strained by the Ayatollahs' regime's repression of demonstrators over the death of Mahsa Amini, and the shipments of Persian weapons to Russian troops in the context of the war in Ukraine. 

Americas Coordinator: José Antonio Sierra.