With expectations of a new round of talks with the EU member nations on
trying to salvage the P5+1 nuclear deal in some form, Iranian Foreign
Minister Javad Zarif warns that no one should be expecting anything better than the deal as it was written in 2015.
Iran isn’t going into the talks hoping for anything better. Rather, Iran
was quite happy with the 2015 deal, and quite unhappy that they never
got what they were promised in the deal, because the US withdrew from
the treaty and never delivered on sanctions relief.
Iran also wants everyone else to be clear that they’re not going to get
any mre concessions from Iran tha\n they already had. Zarif called the
idea that they could negotiate more out of Iran Trump’s “folly.”
The best everyone who wants to keep the deal can hope for is that Iran
and the E3+2 can carve out a subset of the original deal, in which Iran
gets enough sanctions relief to make it worth keeping the deal intact.
Iran clearly sees little benefit to keeping the current pact in place if
the other parties aren’t going to deliver on relief.
There should be a whole lot better deal, originally and now, for Iran.
These talks are utterly useless. The JCPOA is dead. There’s no way the EU can save it.
The sole reason for the deal as far as Iran was concerned was to get the US off its back. The EU was never a significant participant – and Russia and China were just there to implement the deal, Russia especially. Once the US withdrew and reimposed its sanctions, the JCPOA was dead.
Iran is just walking out the clock until they withdraw. The EU can never offer enough sanctions relief to make the deal work without actually passing laws *forcing* EU companies and banks to deal with Iran and compensating companies against the impact of US sanctions. I suppose theoretically that could happen, but the probability is next to nil.
The EU would have to break completely with the US over Iran – and that ain’t gonna happen. Because issues like this also impact all the other connections that are between the US and the EU. No one in the EU is going to threaten that over Iran.
There needs to be a clear focus on what can come next.
Likely that means Iran deals with China, Russia, and India, isolated from the West much as the Soviets were.
If the US is kept from attacking, that will be between the US and Russia/China, just as was preventing the US from attacking Cuba.
That might require demonstration to the US that it has major interests at risk, for example preserving the Gulf monarchies and the Israel Project.