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ERBIL, Kurdistan Region — Indirect nuclear negotiations between the United States and Iran could take longer than expected as an agreement will not be reached until every last detail is finalized, the US deputy secretary of state said on Wednesday. A sixth round of talks in Vienna will begin this weekend.
“I think there's been a lot of progress made, but, out of my own experience, until the last detail is nailed down, and I mean nailed down, we will not know if we have an agreement,” Wendy Sherman said in a virtual Q&A with the German Marshall Fund think tank, adding “I hope we can get to compliance for compliance.”
Sherman was one of Washington’s lead negotiators when the original deal was struck.
Iran too is cautious as it looks toward the next round of negotiations with the other signatories of the 2015 nuclear deal.
“We will start a new round of talks next week and we hope to make progress on various issues, but it is too early to judge whether this will be the last round of talks,” deputy foreign minister Abbas Araghchi said on Wednesday, according to semi-official Tasnim News.
Sherman said the US has other issues with Iran, but the nuclear matter is top priority.
“If Iran is allowed to have a nuclear weapon, their ability to project power into the Middle East will be even greater, and project power toward Europe and to us even greater, and it will be impossible to deal with all of the other issues of concern,” Sherman said.
Negotiations between the remaining signatories of the 2015 nuclear deal – Iran, Russia, China, UK, France and Germany – began in early April in Vienna to find a route for the United States to rejoin the accord, lifting sanctions and for Iran to return to full compliance with its nuclear obligations. The fifth round of talks ended on June 2 with optimism that a deal could be reached.
Former US President Donald Trump withdrew from the landmark nuclear accord, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), in 2018 and began a “maximum pressure” campaign of sanctions in a bid to force Tehran to make a new deal that would also address its ballistic missile program and regional activities.
Under the sanctions, Iran has steadily walked back on its nuclear commitments and is now enriching uranium up to at least 60 percent, far above the 3.67 percent limit set in the agreement.
Iran has said it would return to its commitments under the deal, but only in exchange for a full lift on US sanctions, a request that the US has rejected on multiple occasions.
Sherman said the upcoming Iranian elections have “complicated” the process.
Iran is holding presidential elections on June 18. The nuclear accord was signed under outgoing President Hassan Rouhani and it is unclear what stance his successor will take.
A US State Department spokesperson on Wednesday said their efforts are motivated by the urgency of the matter itself rather than an election date.
“We do recognize that this is a challenge that we need to treat and that we have treated with a good deal of urgency, and that is not dictated by any sort of electoral calendar, it is not dictated by anything other than the fact that the longer Iran remains free from the most stringent verification and monitoring regime ever negotiated, the more potentially dangerous Iran's nuclear program could become,” Ned Price said in a press briefing.
On Tuesday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken also warned of Iran’s increased uranium enrichment saying that they “need to put this nuclear problem back in the box that it was in.”
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