Third Round of US and Iran Talks: A Glimmer of Hope or Superficial Progress? A third round of talks seems to be a bit of a positive development in what has been a very tense relationship, to put it lightly, between Washington and Tehran. Is it really, though? I mean, what does this signal for this relationship moving forward?
So, I mean, I think you can think about this two ways. Superficially, really, on the face of it, a third round of talks is a pretty successful outcome given how bad the rhetoric had become.
But again, this is where you have to look at the second element, which is inject a bit of reality into the system. Are we going to be anywhere close to getting a deal that basically makes all sides feel like they’ve won? And that’s going to be absolutely key to a successful deal here.
Every single policy in this deal must feel that they got something out of it. And are all the positions of the protagonists, that is specifically the U.S., but obviously Iran, Israel, and so on and so forth, are they compatible in any way, in a way that you can do a deal that actually moves the thing forward? Because remember, we’ve had years and years and years of acrimony here. It’s going to be very hard to find some sort of formula that keeps everyone happy.
What would be the positive outcome then for Iran?
would they be able to hold on to any of its nuclear program if in fact you said all sides need to be kept happy?
I think that’s certainly one of the likely outcomes. The question is the following, which is if you allow Iran to keep any of its nuclear program, that is enrich uranium to any extent whatsoever, how on earth do you go about monitoring that over the long term to give everyone the confidence that you’re not enriching things to a point where it’s potentially close to weapons grade?
And that’s exactly what we’ve seen over the last decade. So you have this deal in 2015. The U.S. pulls out of it in 2018, if I’m right. And then ever since then, what’s been happening is that the uranium enrichment has been getting larger and larger, higher and higher. And of course, during that period, Iran’s expertise in producing all this stuff has just got better and better.
Source: raialkhalij + aljazeera