Malley Rules Out ‘Lowering Standards’ Over Iran Sanctions
Rob Malley, lead American negotiator in the Iran nuclear talks, told NPR Friday that United States officials were reviewing proposals from the European Union.
Rob Malley, lead American negotiator in the Iran nuclear talks, told NPR Friday that United States officials were reviewing proposals from the European Union.
Last Monday Enrique Mora, the EU official coordinating talks, presented a text aimed at overcoming obstacles to renewing the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, the JCPOA (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action). Iranian officials have said the text is under review in Tehran.
Malley, the White House special Iran envoy, acknowledged to NPR that EU mediators, who have chaired talks for over a year, believe negotiations have “exhausted their usefulness.”
“We’re considering the text very carefully to make sure it lives up to the president’s very clear guidance that he would only sign up to a deal…consistent with US national security interests,” Malley said.
Malley was pressed over reports the US has signaled willingness to rule out punitive action against non-US companies dealing with Iranian entities linked to Iran’s Revolutionary Guards (IRGC). This has been reported as a potential compromise consistent with President Joe Biden’s insistence he will not unilaterally remove the IRGC from the US list of ‘foreign terrorist organizations.’
“We have not, and will not negotiate any lowering of our standards,” Malley said. “If they [non-US entities] want to do business with Iran they have to respect our sanctions…any reports to the contrary…are flat-out wrong.”
Uranium traces – ‘no short-cut’
Malley also denied reports the US would agree, as part of JCPOArevival, to pressure the International Atomic Energy Agency to drop enquiries into uranium traces found in 2019 at Iranian sites used before 2003 but not declared as nuclear-linked. He reiterated the US position that, regardless of JCPOA talks, Tehran should satisfy the agency over the traces as part of its ‘safeguards’ commitment under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
“Really what the agency is interested is not so much pre-historical, or historical, explanation,” Malley said. “They want to know where is that uranium today, that it’s accounted for, that it’s under what is called ‘safeguards’… There’s no short-cut.”
Malley refused to put forward any figure for assets Iran might access with JCPOA restoration – with the release of money frozen worldwide in banks fearing US secondary sanctions – or for what Tehran might net from higher oil sales, currently facing US ‘maximum pressure.’
He said a restored nuclear deal would be better than Iran “with an unconstrained nuclear program and with more aggressive regional behavior” as had occurred since President Donald Trump withdrew the US from the JCPOA in 2018, prompting Iran by 2019 to expand its atomic work beyond JCPOA limits.
Sunset clauses
Questioned over ‘sunset clauses’ under which JCPOA limits expire, Malley stressed the deal’s constraints. “In 2023 they can do more research and development on some advanced centrifuges, they cannot install them. The main constraint…[which] puts Iran several months away from having enough fissile material for one bomb… would last until 2031…The situation we’re in today, as a result of the decision to withdraw from the deal, is Iran is only a handful of weeks away from having enough fissile material for a bomb…”
JCPOA critics in Tehran and Washington have seized on the current negotiations pause. Veteran newspaper editor Hossein Shariatmadari wrote Wednesday that further talks were “futile.” In the US, Republicans and other deal opponents have cited an alleged Iranian plot to kill former national security advisor John Boltonand Friday’s attack on writer Salman Rushdie in arguing for an end to nuclear talks or expelling Iran’s diplomats at the United Nations in New York.
Mohammad Marandi, who acts as de facto spokesman on the talks, referred both to the four-day round of meetings in Vienna that concluded Monday and to earlier rounds. “Iran was able to make significant progress in all fields, which of course will be announced in due course,” Marandi told the Young Journalists Club, a state-owned news agency.
Marandi claimed western journalist had told him that “many government elites of Western countries, as well as Persian-language media people based abroad” also regarded the talks as a success for Iran.
The Vienna talks – largely indirect contacts between the United States and Iran mediated by the European Union – ended with senior EU official Enrique Mora circulating a document designed to bridge remaining gaps. While the EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell called this a “final text,” Iranian officials treated it as a set of proposals needing further review.
Awaiting ‘high-level meeting’
Nour News, affiliated to Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, reported late Wednesday that the text was being analyzed “at the experts’ level,” but had not yet been discussed by a “high-level meeting.” The SNSC, made up of 24 of Iran’s leading politicians and military commanders, shapes policy on the nuclear issue, although crucial decisions may come in informal discussions around Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.
The nuclear talks, beginning in April 2021 in an effort to revive the 2015 agreement (the JCPOA), have wrestled with intertwined political and technical issues – essentially over which US sanctions introduced after Washington left the JCPOA in 2018 contravene the 2015 agreement and how Iran’s atomic program, expanded since 2019, should be returned to JCPOA limits.
Marandi reiterated that Tehran expects the dropping of “false accusations against Iran in the agency,” a reference to enquiries by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) into Iranian nuclear work before 2003. The US and three European JCPOA signatories argue these enquiries arise under Tehran’s basic obligations as a signatory of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and have nothing to do with renewing the JCPOA.
Iran, on the other hand, argues that the IAEA concluded investigations into Iran’s past nuclear work in 2015, the year the JCPOA was agreed, and revived them only after allegations made by Israel in 2018, the year the US left the JCPOA.
“Let's not forget that before the previous meeting of the Board of Governors [in June, which passed a resolution critical of Iran], the head of the agency, [Rafael Mariano] Grossi, travelled to Israel,” Marandi said.
Iran had promised earlier this year to provide satisfactory answers to the IAEA regarding questions around its past secret nuclear work, but in late May the agency said it had not received convincing explanations.
Guarded comments
In remarks published Thursday on the Rouydad news website, Hossein Maliki, of the Iranian parliament’s security and foreign policy committee, warned that negotiations could be facing a “dead end…because we see less flexibility in the Americans.”
Maliki said he had not seen the Mora text, but his guarded comments – noting Iran’s “positive opinion” on “some provisions” of a “previous text”, an apparent reference to a document circulated by Borrell in late July – suggested he was hedging while long-term JCPOA opponents argued the talks had failed.
The official news agency IRNA reported that Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, in a telephone conversation with Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu, expressed hope that “the American side, with a realistic and pragmatic view…will provide the ground for an agreement on the final text.”