TEHRAN – Iran says new sanctions announced by the U.S. against the Islamic Republic will not give any leverage to the West which is currently engaged in talks with Tehran to revive a 2015 nuclear deal.
On Tuesday, Washington sanctioned specialist units of Iran’s law enforcement agencies and counter-terror forces, as well as several of their officials, and Gholamreza Soleimani, who commands Iran’s Basij force, just before the return of the remaining signatories of the nuclear deal to Vienna to resume negotiations.
“Even amid #ViennaTalks, U.S. cannot stop imposing sanctions against Iran,” Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Saeed Khatibzadeh wrote on Twitter.
“Washington fails to understand that ‘maximum failure’ & a diplomatic breakthrough are mutually exclusive,” he said. “Doubling down on sanctions won’t create leverage—and is anything but seriousness & goodwill.”
Khatibzadeh’s statement appeared to mirror remarks by American officials who said Iran’s nuclear capabilities would not benefit it in the negotiations.
“They [the Iranians] believe that they could accumulate more enriched uranium at higher levels and use more advanced centrifuges as leverage for a deal that they think they could extract more from us and give less their part,” a senior U.S. official told reporters on condition of anonymity on Saturday. “And that’s not a negotiating tactic that’s going to work.”
The seventh round of Vienna talks concluded on Friday, with Washington accusing Tehran of not being serious about reviving the agreement, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), even as the U.S. is the party which has quit the agreement and unilaterally imposed sanctions on the Islamic Republic.
Tehran insists the U.S. should first undo its wrongs, including all its sanctions, in order to revive the agreement. Washington says Iran should first retract its remedial measures which it took after a year in response to the U.S. move.
For a year, Iran waited for the remaining parties to support and protect it against the U.S. sanctions, but to no avail. The country then began scaling back its obligations a per an article of the nuclear agreement which allows parties to take remedial measures in response.
Since former U.S. President Donald Trump withdrew from the agreement in 2018, Washington has been piling sanctions on Iranian industries, government agencies and officials.
Last month, the Treasury Department announced sanctions on six Iranian nationals and an Iranian cyber company, claiming that they attempted to influence the U.S. presidential elections in 2020.
Iran insists that all U.S. sanctions must be removed to restore the agreement and maintains that – unlike
the U.S. – it is still party to the pact.
Last week’s talks in Vienna were the first since Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi took office in August. The negotiations had been paused since June.
France’s Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian said on Tuesday that he expects the talks to resume on Thursday.
Iranian officials say they have submitted two proposals that would secure a return to the deal.
They say they will later provide a third draft proposal on the “mechanism and time of verification and issues related to receiving guarantees to prevent the re-withdrawal of the U.S. from the nuclear deal”.
On Sunday, a senior Iranian official said the reluctance of the United States to remove all sanctions on Iran is the main challenge to reviving the nuclear pact, as Western countries struck a hard line after the resumption of Vienna talks.
“It is now clear that Washington’s reluctance to give up sanctions altogether is the main challenge to the progress of the talks,” the unnamed official was quoted as saying.
“We believe that a deal is within reach if the U.S. government gives up its campaign of maximum pressure and the European parties show serious flexibility and political will in the talks.”
In an interview with Italy’s ANSA news agency published Sunday, top negotiator Ali Baqeri Kani said Iran will not backtrack on its demands.
“The Islamic Republic of Iran will not backtrack on its demands, which it has put forth in a bid to reactivate the 2015 nuclear deal and get sanctions removed,” he said.
Iran’s proposed drafts, he said, are “documented and logical” and therefore can be used as a basis for negotiations between Tehran and the P4+1 group of countries - the UK, France, Russia and China plus Germany.