John Kerry says there will be no "shaving" at the margins just to get an agreement with Iran.
Aside from getting started in the first place, the endgame is always the hardest part of negotiations. That is proving to be the case in the six-power talks with Iran over its nuclear program. Secretary of State John Kerry
said Sunday that progress has been made but that "tough decisions" on "several" difficult issues need to be made if an agreement is going to be finalized. It could go "either way," he added.
The negotiations are meant to curtail elements of Tehran's nuclear program for 10 to 15 years in exchange for removing international sanctions that have damaged Iran's economy.
Resolving the tough issues means the latest deadline—Tuesday night—likely will be extended to July 9, which realistically has been the deadline since April. That's one deadline the Obama administration for sure doesn't want to miss. Unless an agreement is completed by then, it will mean, because of the August recess, that Congress gets 60 days instead of 30 to review what the negotiators have come up with. And those extra days would mean more time for foes to build congressional opposition to an agreement.
There is already lots of such opposition, and not solely from Republicans, many of whom apparently believe the proper U.S. negotiating stance is a demand that Iran's leaders capitulate entirely.
Opponents of an agreement, at least of the one outlined in April and whose details negotiators have been trying to hammer out since then, argue that a bad deal is worse than no deal, echoing the words of Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's speech to a joint session of Congress in March. The hardliners among those opponents say a good deal with Iran is impossible, and they have not been shy about promoting what they think will curtail its nuclear program: bombing. Repeated bombing if necessary, they say. That, in fact, has been the desired approach of some hardliners for more than 15 years.
Less ferociously opposed foes say the elements of the deal they've seen so far would give away too much to Iran and the United States would come to regret it. But here's Kerry on Sunday:
"“We want a good agreement, only a good agreement, and we’re not going to shave anywhere at the margins in order just to get an agreement,” Mr. Kerry said. “There are plenty of people in the nonproliferation community, nuclear experts, who will look at this,” he added, “and none of us are going to be content to do something that can’t pass scrutiny.”
President Obama
said Tuesday that no deal would be agreed to if Tehran does not accept "serious, rigorous" inspections of its nuclear facilities. "The goal of the nuclear negotiations is not to rely on trust, but to set up a verifiable mechanism where we are cutting off the pathways for Iran to obtain a nuclear weapon," Obama said.
Join me below the fold for more analysis.
On the other side are the public pronouncements of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran's supreme leader and the ultimate decisionmaker on what Tehran will accept or reject in an agreement. Two weeks ago, as the final round of talks got underway, Khamenei set some limits:
All American and UN sanctions must be lifted immediately after an agreement is signed, he said. Curbs on Iran’s nuclear R&D programme were also unacceptable. And he declared that inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) would be refused the access needed to verify that all Iran’s nuclear activities are peaceful. Military sites would be entirely out of bounds, he insisted, as would the interrogation of Iran’s nuclear scientists. Iran’s parliament has also passed a law banning inspectors from military sites.
Was all or some of that just a negotiating bluff? Playing to the home audience? Or did he really mean it? He has said similar things before. But he surely knows that the negotiators of the U.S., France, Britain, China and Russia plus Germany—the P5+1—now getting ready to pull some more all-nighters in Vienna would not sign onto an agreement fitting his parameters.
So was he giving his negotiators marching orders that would likely kill the agreement or just providing them ammunition in the talks so they could bend the final deal to favor Iran better? Omar Memarian at Politico views it as maneuvering mostly for the domestic audience and notes that Khamenei has been the "guardian angel" of the negotiators all along:
As an economist close to [President Hassan] Rouhani circles told me last week from Tehran, “Iran has not been in the talks for 18 months to blow it, but to make a deal.”
The talks obviously are in flux. Here are some of the issues public sources say are not yet resolved:
• Dealing with suspicions about Iran’s past nuclear activities, what the negotiating jargon calls "possible military dimensions." Critics say that without knowing what Iran has done secretly in the past to weaponize its nuclear program, inspectors will have a more difficult time exposing possible violations of an agreement.
• Inspections of military bases. As noted, Khamenei has been resistant to allowing inspection of all military bases that U.N. inspectors suspect of harboring current nuclear activities. Progress has been made in this matter, with negotiators developing wording that would allow such inspections only on a case-by-case basis.
• Constraints on the research and development of more sophisticated centrifuges designed to concentrate uranium, which can be used to make nuclear fuel for power reactors or, if concentrated enough, for weapons. For several years, Iran has been using mostly first-generation centrifuges—IR-1—and some slightly upgraded models for this purpose. But it has also fashioned others, including model IR-8 that can work 20 times faster than the older models. If a few thousand IR-8s were installed, experts believe Iran would have the capability to produce enough highly enriched uranium to build a nuclear bomb in about three weeks.
• Timing of sanctions relief. This remains one of the key issues for Tehran. Iran's negotiators have said nuclear-related sanctions must be lifted as soon as the agreement is signed or at least implemented. The United States and French in particular want the sanctions lifted in a phased fashion as Iran meets its commitments under the agreement. Some progress has been made on timing in a way that might allow some face-saving by Iran's leaders, who have been adamant in statements made to the home audience on this matter.
If there is a nuclear deal, it would include a new U.N. Security Council resolution that would lift all the U.N. nuclear-related sanctions but at the same time reimpose the existing non-nuclear restrictions on Iran, including an arms embargo that Tehran also would like to see removed.
• There is also continuing disagreement about which sanctions should be lifted. The U.S. and the other negotiators want only the nuclear-related sanctions taken off. Iran wants other sanctions removed, too. Included in these are sanctions on Iran's ballistic missile program that the P5+1 wants to keep intact and Tehran wants removed. That seems to be a non-starter in Vienna.