On Friday, France’s foreign minister said some progress has been made this week during the Iran nuclear deal negotiations in Vienna, a rare positive comment about the talks from Paris.
“I remain convinced we can reach a deal. Bits of progress had been made in the last few days,” French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian said. “We have been heading in a positive direction in the last few days, but time is of the essence, because if we don’t get an accord quickly there will be nothing to negotiate.”
Before this week, the US and its allies involved in the JCPOA negotiations have been accusing Iran of not taking the process seriously. But now it appears the Western powers are backing down a bit as it’s clear Tehran won’t accept a bad deal.
Russia’s envoy in Vienna wrote on Twitter that all participants in the talks now “recognize that some progress is being made towards an agreement on restoration of JCPOA and sanctions lifting.”
What the talks come down to is whether or not the Biden administration is willing to give Iran the proper sanctions relief to revive the JCPOA. On Thursday, Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian said a deal could be reached if the US lifts sanctions and gives guarantees that it won’t pull out of the agreement again.
In other words, everything has been negotiated except the one point of interest: the US rejoining the JCPOA and agreeing to lift sanctions.
In still other words: there is no deal. And there isn’t going to be one because as others have pointed out, the US and Israel aren’t going to let Iran become the Middle East economic powerhouse it would become if it was allowed to do business like every other nation.
This whole affair has been a farce from the beginning.
Nothing to negotiate?! Arbitrary deadlines are just more one-sided maximum pressure, along with the US and Israeli threats of war.
The U.S. won’t lift sanctions, and the U.S. can’t guarantee that it will not pull out of the agreement again. With a Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio as president, the U.S. would pull out of the new JCPOA immediately. In short, the U.S. can’t be trusted to abide by any agreements. Never an honest word from the U.S.
France said?
Anybody asked France anything?
There is no deal, US will not return to JPCOA, and will not remove sanctions.
The objective is to keep Iran’s economy down.
Europe and US are esentially still profiting from colonial/neocolonial set up globally.
The system depends on keeping most countries undeveloped as a skurce of raq materials, cheep products and endless cheap workforce.
And that means keeping down especially those countries with important geography, to prevent infrastructure connectivity.
But the development cannot be blocked forever. While in twentieth century still all world’s trade was oriented towards oceans and trading with “developed” world, new century is seeing Eurasian continental conectivity. RCEP trade deal puts China at the center of Asian trade, Today, Laos new railroad is land-land connectivity. getting a landlocked country a link to the world via Chinese trade hub.
Iran is being connected to Gulf and to Central Asia, to China and Europe.
One of the major reasons for Russia bashing is to block Asia connectivity to Eurole via land. It is to fforce everyone back to ocean routes West plans to control,
But Europe is losing purchasing power, so continental routes acquire new meaning. Germany is the only country in Europe trully harmed by blickade of Russia, as China is a key customer. Europe will isolate itself and lose competitiveness.