Nuclear negotiators with only a day left to strike a comprehensive accord with Iran have shifted their focus to squeezing out a less ambitious agreement in a bid to buy more time to end an 11-year standoff.
In addition to weighing a partial or short-term accord, the U.S and Iran are also discussing possible terms for extending the deadline, said a State Department official who asked not to be identified because the talks are confidential. The U.S. is also discussing a possible extension with the other world powers working to curb Iran’s nuclear program, including France, Russia, China, the U.K. and Germany, the official said.
“We are still far apart on many points” with the Iranians and “I can’t say” whether an agreement will result, German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said in an interview on ARD German public television late today.
A year-old interim accord, aimed at ending Iran’s isolation from the West by restricting its nuclear ambitions, is set to expire at midnight tomorrow. The risk facing negotiators is that a partial deal could come under attack from hard-line politicians in the U.S. and Iran who oppose diplomacy.
The six world powers are continuing to discuss with Iran the underlying issues in an attempt to make progress, the State Department official said.
German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, left, meets with U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, right, yesterday in Vienna, Austria. “We still have some serious gaps which we’re working to close,” Kerry said yesterday before meeting his German colleague, Steinmeier. Close
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German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, left, meets with U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, right, yesterday in Vienna, Austria. “We still have some serious gaps which we’re working to close,” Kerry said yesterday before meeting his German colleague, Steinmeier.
Russia, China
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry held a flurry of meetings with his counterparts, including Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, who arrived in the afternoon. Russia “remains at our side” in the nuclear talks, Steinmeier said.
Kerry also met twice with Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif -- once on his own, once with European Union envoy Catherine Ashton. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs said on its website that Foreign Minister Wang Yi was en route to Vienna.
An Iranian diplomat denied a media report that a comprehensive deal is impossible given the time remaining. Negotiators are still considering other paths to an agreement that would cap Iran’s fissile material production in exchange for sanctions relief, he said, asking not to be identified in line with diplomatic rules.
Kerry is also staying in touch with other nations which have a stake in the outcome.
Saudi Arabia’s foreign minister Prince Saud al-Faisal, flew to Vienna for a brief airport meeting with Kerry, their second meeting in a week. Saud, one of the staunchest critics of Iran’s nuclear program, also met this week with Lavrov in Moscow, where the two men agreed to cooperate to halt sliding oil prices.
“If an Iran deal is reached and Gulf leaders dislike it, preventing the proliferation of nuclear technology in the region will be a considerable challenge,” according to an analysis last week by Simon Henderson, director of the Gulf and Energy Policy Program at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, and Olli Heinonen, a former deputy director-general for safeguards at the International Atomic Energy Agency.
Israeli Concern
Kerry also spoke yesterday with Gulf foreign ministers and called Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
“We are anxiously monitoring developments in these talks,” Netanyahu said today at his weekly cabinet meeting. Israel is telling other major powers “that Iran must not be allowed to be determined as a nuclear threshold state.”
Talks could be extended for as long as a year, Russia’s Interfax news service reported today, citing an unidentified official close to the negotiations. Other officials have talked about an extension as short as few weeks or as long as six months.
The speed at which sanctions are rolled back under a possible deal remained one of the main sticking points, four diplomats told Bloomberg News when talks began this week. Iran’s capacity to produce fissile material is the other main point of disagreement, they said.
‘Hour of Truth’
A third issue -- how Iran will address suspicions revolving around its past nuclear work -- isn’t complicating talks, a Western diplomat said. IAEA director general Yukiya Amano said last week the body is ready to “accelerate” its investigation of those allegations. The IAEA’s 35-member board of governors, led by the world powers negotiating with Iran, is ultimately responsible for concluding if Iran has sufficiently cooperated.
Israel and the U.S. haven’t ruled out the possibility of military action to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon. Iran, which says its program is solely for energy and industrial uses, has seen its economy squeezed and oil output slashed under sanctions.
On the question of an extension, President Barack Obama said that will depend on where things stand at the end of today.
“The good news is that the interim deal that we entered into has definitely stopped Iran’s nuclear program from advancing, and in some cases has actually rolled back some of the things that they were doing,” Obama said in a recorded interview broadcast today on ABC’s “This Week” program.
“The question now just becomes, ‘Can Iran say yes?’” and they have their own hardliners,’’ Obama said.
To contact the reporters on this story: Jonathan Tirone in Vienna at jtirone@bloomberg.net; Kambiz Foroohar in New York at kforoohar@bloomberg.net; Terry Atlas in Washington at tatlas@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Alan Crawford at acrawford6@bloomberg.net Maura Reynolds, Vince Golle
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