Though officials on the Iranian side have termed next week’s Istanbul talks with the P5+1 the “last chance” for a major deal, neither side appears to be going into the talks in much of a dealing mood, leaving the prospects that any sort of deal will emerge dim.
US officials are demanding “seriousness” from their Iranian counterparts, but the entire US negotiating strategy appears to be predicated upon their anti-Iran sanctions working so well that Iran will show up eagerly willing to agree to any and all US demands. And there will be a lot of them.
Iran, for its part, says they will only discuss technical and legal issues, and will not agree to abandon their civilian nuclear program in its entirety. Given that this is a core US demand, there appears to be little point to the talks themselves.
Indeed the tenor is much as it was before the previous talks, which hastily ended with no deal beyond the fact that they would meet again in Istanbul. Given that the US followed those talks by chastizing Iran for agreeing to the Istanbul talks, saying it proved they were delaying the situation, the only decent bet is that another round of talks won’t be so easily arranged.
Neither side is sincere about the talks, though Iran seems to be more honest about them. Iran appears to be quite open about not being willing to discuss the legitimacy of its nuclear program – and rightly so. The US pretends to be offering a deal, which it knows to be no deal at all – and you can be sure that if Iran actually accepted that deal, a whole raft of new demands would magically appear. We saw this very scenario played out when Obama told Brazil to go ahead and negotiate a deal with Iran, and then, when that actually worked out, next thing you knew, Obama had a new list of demands. 'Ooops, forgot to tell you, Brazil, that we now want twice as much uranium out of Iran and etc…'. Must be nice to have the media on your side no matter what. You can lie, prevaricate, threaten, even assault and you can be sure that your pet media will run with whatever thin excuses you provide, or will make up whatever you don't provide.
Here we go again. It's Threaten Iran Day in the USA again.