VIENNA – Negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program have reached an impasse as foreign ministers from Iran and the P5+1 powers have announced that they are leaving Vienna, where talks have been ongoing for the past few days.
Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif will be traveling back to Tehran later today, reportedly to consult with with Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. British Foreign Minister Phillip Hammond will only stay in Vienna for a few hours before heading back to London, while U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry will fly to Paris with French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius to consult with “European counterparts,” per a State Department statement. The statement also mentioned that Kerry’s timeline for returning to Vienna is unclear, which the Associated Press hypothesized that it “suggests that he is waiting to see whether Zarif is returning with new proposals before deciding” whether to return.
According to numerous news reports, Iran is seemingly to blame for the failure to reach an agreement thus far. A Reuters dispatch noted that “Western officials say Iran has refused to budge on enrichment, despite repeated offers of potential compromises by the six powers, including the United States…They say the West is willing to compromise but Iran is not largely because Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has not given the negotiators the freedom to do so.”
However, if Khamenei’s past statements are anything to go on, that freedom may be unlikely to be granted. As the Wall Street Journal reported:
One issue involves the number of centrifuge machines, which refine nuclear fuel, that Iran is allowed to keep under a deal. Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has said Tehran may need more than 100,000 in a few years and Iranian officials have resisted any major cut in the roughly 10,000 they are currently operating. The U.S. is calling for a few thousand, under tight international monitoring.
Indeed, yesterday Iranian nuclear chief Ali Akbar Salehi demanded that “Iran would increase its enrichment capacity to around 20 times its current ability within eight years,” according to a report by Al Jazeera.
The deadline for negotiations is Monday, November 24.
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