On Nov. 29, after a nearly half-year hiatus, the Iran nuclear negotiations restarted in Vienna.
Well, sort of.
The Iranians, led by a newly elected hard-line government, refuse to negotiate directly with the Americans, so European intermediaries need to relay each side's positions.
And among the first positions the Iranians claimed in a Financial Times commentary was that the very term "nuclear negotiations" was "rife with error." Instead, wrote Ali Bagheri Kani, a deputy foreign minister who's leading the Iranian side, the talks' primary objective is "to gain a full, guaranteed and verifiable removal of the sanctions that have been imposed on the Iranian people."
That's a nonstarter for the Biden administration, which wants the U.S. and Iran to return to the terms of the 2015 pact known formally as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA. But Biden knows, especially after the justifiable domestic and geopolitical blowback from the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan, that giving up more for less is unacceptable.
The reason for the restart of talks is the Trump administration's unilateral withdrawal from an accord agreed upon not just by Iran and the U.S., but the U.K., France, Germany, the European Union, China and Russia. However imperfect the pact was, even the Trump administration acknowledged that Iran was in compliance with the strict terms of the deal — albeit continuing its regionally destabilizing, malevolent behavior in multiple nearby nations like Lebanon, Iraq, Yemen and Syria.
After abiding by the JCPOA for a while after the U.S. withdrawal, Iran has ramped up its nuclear program and is now much closer to being able to break out to deployment if it chooses to do so. According to the U.N.'s International Atomic Energy Agency, Iran has built more modern centrifuges than were allowed under the nuclear deal and has blocked previously negotiated IAEA inspection access to sensitive sites.
Iran has also somewhat mitigated the sanctions by selling oil on the open market, particularly to China, in violation of the sanctions. Economic conditions are as harsh as the theocracy itself. But the country has survived and the government has extinguished most of the internal dissent necessary to force Tehran to make the external concessions that would allow it to come back into compliance with the deal.