Secretary of State John Kerry said Sunday that the US and Iran are closer to reaching a final nuclear deal but expressed uncertainty about hitting their 48-hour deadline, saying negotiations “could go either way”.
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Kerry said yesterday that “it is now time” to finalise a historic nuclear deal with Iran, on a ninth day of talks in Vienna between Tehran and major powers. Both sides agreed to extend the deadline to July 7.
But I’ve said from the moment I became involved in this 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.
“All of that information will be made available to Congress so that we can properly evaluate and decide what action, if any, would be appropriate for us to take”, Cardin said on This Week.
President Obama was right to say recently that he is prepared to walk away from a deal without a “serious, rigorous verification mechanism”.
Under the mooted accord, building on a deal from April, sanctions suffocating the Iranian economy will be progressively lifted if Teheran massively scales down its nuclear programme for at least a decade.
“It seems that the nuclear talks (with) Iran have yielded a collapse, not a breakthrough”, he said according to remarks released by his office, saying the deal would pave the way to Iran making nuclear bombs and increasing regional aggression.
Low-enriched uranium can be further enriched to make fissile material for an atomic bomb, and one of the main goals of any nuclear deal is to restrain Iran’s production of it.
But the six powers had yet to agree with Iran on a United Nations Security Council resolution that would lift U.N. sanctions and establish a means of re-imposing them in case of Iranian non-compliance with a future agreement. And that’s why we simply want to see what the agreement is. Western and Iranian diplomats said Tehran was considering shipping most of the stockpile out of the country, something Tehran had previously ruled out. United States officials have warned that they could go past a Tuesday deadline, but negotiators are eager to complete the deal by Thursday. The agency is still trying to get Iran to hand over additional documents and information that would shed light on the past military aspects of Iran’s nuclear program, which the country has insisted has always been peaceful.
Critics of the United States’ diplomacy on the issue argue that President Obama’s administration has been too conciliatory over the course of the negotiations. “Because as that video shows, they think they’re negotiating from a position of strength, that they hold all the cards”. “A segment of our political elite and intellectuals who believe Iran needs closer relations with the west think the 1979 revolution needs to finish”, said Foad Ezzadi, a Tehran University professor who describes himself as a “principalist” – or hardliner, in less elevated language.
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Iran is “hemorrhaging hundreds of billions because of sanctions and tens of billions because of the drop in oil prices”, points out the Carnegie Endowment’s Karim Sadjadpour, one of the shrewdest USA experts on Iran. To overcome the veto, the deal will need to be rejected in a second round of voting by two thirds of Congress and the Senate.
