With roughly two weeks still to go before they reach their June 30 deadline, negotiators in Vienna are already talking about an extension, so that ought to give you some idea how far apart the two sides still are in drafting a comprehensive agreement (and even if they’re just posturing, they’re posturing for a reason). Iran’s PressTV quotes Deputy Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi saying that “a specific date is not sacred to us,” and that the Iranian negotiators ““will not sacrifice a good and favorable agreement for the sake of” the June 30 deadline. In that same interview, though, Araqchi appeared to make a significant concession with respect to the timing of sanctions relief, which continues to be one of the big sticking points in the talks:
Araqchi noted that due to “some technical and legal procedures,” nuclear-related sanctions against Tehran will not be lifted concurrently with the signing of any possible final deal between Iran and the P5+1 group.
“All economic and financial sanctions against Iran will be lifted on the possible [final] agreement’s implementation date,” which is a date other than the one when the prospective deal is signed, he said.
Iran has been insisting that the sanctions must be lifted when the deal is signed, not when it’s implemented, but the P5+1 have been equally insistent that it must be the opposite. Now, Iranian officials frequently say stuff only to contradict themselves (or be contradicted by a higher authority) later, so there’s an uncertainty to statements like this, and complications in translating what the Iranians say in Persian into English only compounds that uncertainty. But this does seem like progress, even though it may only open the door to the next dispute, how to define the point at which the deal has been “implemented.”
The other sticking points appear to be over what kind of nuclear and enrichment R&D Iran will be allowed to undertake during the course of the deal, and whether inspectors will be allowed to have access to Iranian military facilities (where they may have reason to suspect that work related to weaponization is taking or has taken place) and the right to interview Iranian nuclear scientists. This latter point is a big one for both sides — a really robust inspections mechanism requires full access to any suspected nuclear site and to the people involved in the nuclear program, but no country wants IAEA inspectors poking around their military facilities and wringing info out of their personnel, and the Iranians may fear that inspectors will invent phony “suspicions” as an excuse to do a little spying. Iran has apparently agreed to implement the IAEA’s “Advanced Protocol” as part of a comprehensive deal, and that would require the Iranians to permit “managed access” to military sites, so this may be a matter of defining what constitutes “managed access” as opposed to “inspections,” which is where the Iranians have been drawing the line. There may also be some new US demands that are gumming things up as well.
With Congressional attempts to derail the talks pretty much kaput since the passage of the watered-down Corker bill last month, the two sides are free to blow through this deadline just as they’ve blown through every other one apart from their March deadline to announce a framework (and even that came a few days late). However, if no deal is reported to Congress by July 9, then the review period called for under the Corker bill doubles, from 30 to 60 days. This is a complication, as it impacts the timing of implementation on a final deal, but presumably not a deal-killer (it’s unlikely Obama would have signed the bill if he thought that were the case).
I would guess that missing the June 30 deadline might lead to renewed calls among American hawks for new sanctions or something else that would bust the negotiations up, but right now I suspect they’d have a tough time overcoming a filibuster in the Senate, let alone overriding a veto. Still, that won’t last forever. Congress is inevitably going to get jittery about the talks again, especially with an election year coming up when many incumbents may decide that they need to show the voters that they’re “tough on Iran.”
But, hey, you could (could!) argue that Congress’s nervousness is actually a good thing in this case. These talks do seem to make more progress when they’re under a real, external deadline than they do under these weak self-imposed ones.
The Foreign Exchanges Companion 