Iran Agency Claims Tehran Imposed Its Ideas On US In Vienna
Iran's official news agency IRNA has claimed that Tehran managed to impose its will on the US side and leave Washington empty handed at nuclear talks in Vienna.
Meanwhile, the government owned newspaper Iran which is the mouthpiece of the Raisi Administration wrote on Thursday that Iran might still withdraw from negotiations.
The IRNA commentary on Thursday said that the former US administration had tabled the 12 conditions when it withdrew from JCPOA in 2018. It also claimed that Secretary of State Antony Blinken started indirect negotiations with Iran in 2021 with the same conditions while extending a velvet hand. The US side wanted to include the issues of Iran's ballistic missiles and its regional ambitions in the talks, but Tehran resisted against the "exceeding demands."
IRNA’s claims aside, the Biden Administration, in fact, has been criticized for not including Iran’s missile and regional aggression in the talks, as it always labelled the Vienna negotiations aimed at reviving the JCPOA.
On the other hand, according to the commentary, Tehran demanded lifting US sanctions in a verifiable way and called for guarantees from the United States to ensure that the next US government will not pull out of a new agreement. However, the commentary did not say that Washington has rejected these deamds.
The commentary said that Former US President Donald Trump wanted a deal with Iran that would go beyond the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), which he called a longer, stronger deal.
The IRNA commentary quoted Pompeo as having said in May 2018 that the US will impose strong financial pressures on Iran but at the same time will be prepared to start negotiations with Tehran. Within a year, IRNA said Iran convinced the US it will not accept any conditions beyond the JCPOA.
Iran, said the commentary, did not want any issues other than the nuclear to be raised, let alone to be discussed during negotiations. It was at that stage that that Pompeo called for negotiations without preconditions. However, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei said that Iran would never go to war with the United States nor start negotiating, IRNA said. When President Joe Biden replaced Trump, Iran realized that the United States was not going to step back from its excessive demands.
"While the US claimed there was no will in Iran to resume negotiations, Washington presented a new JCPOA which it called "JCPOA Plus." The new model also called for an agreement on Iran's missile program and regional policies, but Khamenei insisted that negotiations should be limited to the nuclear issue," the commentary claimed, adding that "the Iranian negotiating team did not accept any solution that would violate Iran's red lines and limit its capabilities. It was this that led the US and its western allies to limit the "new agreement" to the nuclear issue.
Meanwhile, the Iranian government's mouthpiece, Iran newspaper, on Thursday quoted Mostafa Khoshchashm, a political commentator as having said that the United States is likely to start reneging on a deal.
Khoshchashm added that Iran might decide to pull out of the negotiations if this happens. "One of our conditions to start this round of negotiations was that we might react to the other side's dishonesty at any stage. This reaction might lead to our withdrawal from the talks, and this will be unpleasant for the other side," he said, adding that "during the past two or three days the relative optimism about the other side's goodwill has been replaced by pessimism."
