New Iran Nuclear Talks to Begin February 26

Iranian, Western Officials Confirm Date Has Been Set

After spending a solid month promising a meeting in January and trading blame over why it never actually happened, Iran and the P5+1 have agreed to a meeting in Almaty, Kazakhstan, on February 26.

This will be the first meeting with the P5+1, which includes the five permanent members of the UN Security Council and Germany, since a June meeting in Moscow, which ended with an agreement to meet again.

The date was confirmed by officials from the European Union, who were in charge of negotiating a time and place with Iran. British FM William Hague confirmed the talks and condemned Iran, insisting it was urgent that they’d accept the P5+1 offer.

Exactly what that offer is remains unclear, and every time a new round of talks takes place the US comes along with a new round of demands to add on to the ones that weren’t accepted the previous time.

These talks are just one of several negotiation tracks ongoing with Iran regarding their civilian nuclear program, and Iran has continued to meet with the IAEA, which has repeatedly confirmed that the nuclear program is purely civilian, while insisting that they can’t prove that there isn’t some sort of secondary program totally separate from this one that they just don’t know about that might conceivably have military elements. The US has also raised the prospect of bilateral talks with Iran, though whether or not this happens remains to be seen, as Iran has conditioned such talks on the US not threatening to attack them.

Author: Jason Ditz

Jason Ditz is Senior Editor for Antiwar.com. He has 20 years of experience in foreign policy research and his work has appeared in The American Conservative, Responsible Statecraft, Forbes, Toronto Star, Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Providence Journal, Washington Times, and the Detroit Free Press.