Diplomats Close in on Possible Iranian Nuclear Deal

JERUSALEM, Israel – Diplomats trying to salvage the collapsed 2015 Iran nuclear deal (JCPOA) appear close to an agreement that would bring the US and Iran back into the accord. 

“We are close to a possible deal, but we’re not there yet," State Department spokesman Ned Price told reporters during a briefing on Wednesday. “We are going to find out in the near term whether we’re able to get there.”

Axios recently reported that the Biden administration is considering taking Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps off the US terror blacklist in exchange for a public commitment from Tehran to de-escalation in the region. 

When asked about the report, Price said: “It’s not something I can speak to beyond the fact that there are two key issues at the heart of these negotiations. On the one hand, you have the nuclear commitments that Tehran would need to adhere to were it to resume full compliance with the JCPOA.”

“On the other side of the ledger, you have the sanctions relief” the US and world leaders “would be prepared to provide if we were to achieve a mutual return to compliance with the JCPOA. So the issue of sanctions relief is really and has been at the heart of these negotiations, but we’re just not going to speak to specifics at this stage,” he added.

German Foreign Ministry spokesman Christofer Burger also said on Wednesday that work “on drafting a final text has been completed” and the “the necessary political decisions now need to be taken in capitals.”

“We hope that these negotiations can now be swiftly completed,” he added. 

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Negotiators in Vienna have spent months trying to restore the Iranian nuclear deal, which was signed in 2015 to stop Iran from obtaining a nuclear bomb. The accord, signed between Germany, China, Britain, France, Iran, Russia and the United States, lifted most international sanctions on Tehran in exchange for restrictions on its nuclear program.

The deal collapsed in 2018 when former President Donald Trump withdrew from it, arguing that it was weak and poorly negotiated. Iran quickly abandoned the deal after the US withdrawal and has been increasingly violating the accords restrictions on uranium enrichment. 

The Biden administration has made reviving the deal a key priority, arguing that any threat Iran currently poses is exponentially more serious if it obtains a nuclear weapon, and a new agreement could put the necessary restrictions in place to stop Iran’s nuclear development.  

Critics argue the original deal gave Iran a path to a nuclear weapon by removing various restrictions under so-called “sunset clauses,” which were to be gradually lifted. 

One of those critics, former State Department official Gabriel Noronha, recently released information provided to him by current State Department officials.   

Noronha told CBN News, “My former colleagues that I worked with that were so distressed by what they were seeing that they asked me to go public with the details.  Because they said the Congress had not been informed and the American public had not been informed and they were just so worried by the concessions that were being made by the negotiating teams that they felt they needed to say something about it.”

Noronha says the deal clears the way for a nuclear Iran.        

“Unfortunately they’re not getting any of the sunsets on the Iran’s nuclear restrictions lifted or extended.  And so in only nine years Iran will have a clear path to a nuclear weapon. The American people need to know that this deal is illegal.  It is dangerous to American national security.  It’s dangerous to the regional and global security in both in the short term and in the long term.”

Iran’s ballistic missile attack near the US consulate in Irbil, Iraq over the weekend highlighted the urgency of the situation.   

“What it underscores for us is the fact that Iran poses a threat to our allies, to our partners, in some cases to the United States, across a range of realms The most urgent challenge we would face is a nuclear-armed Iran or an Iran that was on the very precipice of obtaining a nuclear weapon. Every challenge that we face and would face from Iran – whether that is its support for proxies, its support for terrorist groups, its ballistic missile program – all of those challenges would become all the more difficult to confront if Iran were in the possession of a nuclear weapon,” said Price.

Meanwhile, on Wednesday, Tehran released two British nationals who were jailed for more than five years after the UK paid a decades-old $515 million debt to Iran. The diplomats negotiating the revival of the 2015 nuclear deal have said it would be nearly impossible to return to the agreement if those British prisoners and other American citizens remain in Iranian captivity. 

Price said on Tuesday that if the prisoner issue is resolved, the nuclear negotiations could quickly move forward if Iran agrees to comply with the accord. 

“We do think that we would be in a position to close those gaps, to close that remaining distance if there are decisions made in capitals, including in Tehran,” Price said.

But Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdolahian says the ball is in Washington’s court “more than ever.”