Iran FM: US Should Give Up Excessive Demands for Deal

Russia: Deal could take days or even weeks

While the Vienna talks for the Iran nuclear deal seem very close to finished, getting from where they stand to a finished, signed deal is filled with uncertainty, with an increasingly pessimistic tone.

Russian Deputy FM Ryabkov says the deal could take days or even weeks to finish. The most recent indications are that the stumbling blocks are the US and Iran, and the question of the Revolutionary Guards being delisted from the terror blacklist.

Iran FM Hossein Amir Abdollahian, talking on the sidelines of a visit to China, said that the US needs to give up on certain “excessive demands” for the deal to get finalized after all the efforts made to prepare the deal.

Its not clear what the US demands are at the moment, but earlier in the process, the US was known to want to make the nuclear deal about Iran’s defensive missiles and other geopolitical matters which had nothing to do with the nuclear program.

Iran considers getting the IRGC off the blacklist a priority, but some Iranian officials have suggested that might be better separated from the nuclear deal, and early reports suggested it would be a purely distinct secondary deal.

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.