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Left: Then-US President-elect Joe Biden on January 14, 2021, in Wilmington, Delaware (AP Photo/Matt Slocum); Right: Iranian President Hassan Rouhani speaks in a meeting in Tehran, Iran, December 9, 2020. (Iranian Presidency Office via AP)
Israeli officials on Sunday night expressed concern that the Biden administration will rush to rejoin the nuclear deal with Iran, arguing that Washington’s negotiating power is compromised by its eagerness to clinch a pact.
“Both sides, the Americans and the Iranians, want a deal. The Iranians smell that the Americans want an agreement at any price,” an official told Channel 12 on condition of anonymity, following a top-level security cabinet meeting on the issue.
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US President Joe Biden at the White House in Washington on April 14, 2021. (Andrew Harnik-Pool/Getty Images/AFP)
WASHINGTON Reviving the Iran nuclear deal would seem like a simple task for US President Joe Biden. Iran wants him to lift sanctions in exchange for Tehran’s return to compliance.
But as Iran and the United States resume indirect talks in Vienna led by the European Union, the Biden administration faces the question of which sanctions exactly are on the table.
Further casting a shadow over the talks is an explosion at a key Iranian nuclear facility purportedly carried out by Israel, a sworn foe of the 2015 accord, which led Tehran to announce it was ramping up uranium enrichment closer to weapons-grade levels.
Abbas Araghchi, political deputy at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Iran, leaves the ‘Grand Hotel Wien’ after the closed-door nuclear talks with with EU,China and Russia in Vienna on April 9, 2021, where diplomats of the EU, China, Russia and Iran held their talks. – The US participates in discussions in Vienna to try to save the international agreement on Iranian nuclear power. However, they don’t meet at the same table as Tehran and it is the Europeans who will serve as intermediaries between the two parties, in the hope of achieving concrete results after two months of impasse. (Photo by JOE KLAMAR / AFP)
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Containment, rather than breakthrough, may be the theme of the talks being held in Vienna between Iran and the five permanent UN Security Council member states plus Germany. The purpose of the negotiations is to revive the nuclear deal signed by the same group of countries in 2015. In parallel, Iranian escalation against the US – a member of the so-called “P5” alongside Britain, China, France and Russia – cannot be ruled out, as such a scenario would serve Tehran’s interests ahead of its presidential election in June.
China and Russia, both allied to Iran, seem to have approached these talks slightly differently.