Having missed a Friday morning USA congressional deadline, USA and European Union officials said they were extending sanctions relief for Iran under an interim deal through Monday to provide more time for talks on a final deal.
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Western countries accuse Iran of seeking the capability to build nuclear weapons, while Tehran says its programme is peaceful.
Lavrov said a deal was “within reach”, and that he was ready to return to Vienna when required, but the quality of the agreement was more important than the timing. Should talks break down it’s “up to them” to walk away, he said of the American negotiators.
If negotiations do collapse – and the conventional wisdom remains that they won’t – you’ll see a sort of odd blame game take place. “But until our government says it’s OK, we’re staying on the sidelines”, Boeing Commercial Airplanes CEO Ray Conner told Reuters in Washington this week. Iran is strategically reinvigorating its diplomacy through normalizing relations with the West and expanding ties with the East. Rouhani’s trip to Ufa this week is just another step in such a direction, while Zarif is taking the other one in Vienna. At the time, she and her negotiating team were working toward a deadline of June 30.
The Iranians spin will be something like “the Supreme Leader knew all along that the Americans couldn’t be trusted to negotiate in good faith – something that he repeated in speeches every couple of months – and he ordered the negotiations to end to protect the Revolution from Western duplicity”. A deal presented to Congress by July 9 would have been subject to a 30-day review period. US Secretary of State John Kerry said Thursday that “we’re making real progress” but that “we are not going to sit at the negotiating table forever”.
The Cabinet secretaries and other USA negotiators have spent the last two weeks cloistered in the Austrian capital, fueled not only by their desire to reach an elusive nuclear accord, but also an impressive supply of snacks: 10 pounds of Twizzlers, 20 pounds of string cheese, 30 pounds of mixed nuts and dried fruit, and more than 200 Rice Krispies treats.
“Suddenly everyone has their own red lines”. But Russian Federation has publicly sided with Iran on the arms issue, describing it as a matter of fighting terrorism. “The Council followed up this export ban with more comprehensive restrictions on the sale to or from Iran of certain heavy-weapons, including battle tanks, combat aircraft, attack helicopters, warships, and the like in 2010 via UNSCR 1929”.
United Against Nuclear Iran: Founded in 2008, UANI boasts a bipartisan powerhouse advisory board of ex- politicians, intelligence officials and policy experts.
A successful deal could be the biggest milestone in decades towards easing hostility between Iran and the United States, enemies since Iranian revolutionaries stormed the USA embassy in Tehran in 1979.
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It would also be a political success for both US President Barack Obama and Iran’s pragmatic President Hassan Rouhani, both of whom face scepticism from powerful hardliners at home.
