The next round of negotiations between Iran and the P5+1 are scheduled for next week in Geneva. While an ongoing charm offensive by Iranian president Hassan Rouhani has been praised for changing Iran’s tone toward the West, it has been criticized for offering zero new concessions that might move negotiations forward.
Questions also continue to swirl regarding whether Rouhani is willing or able to fundamentally change Tehran’s stance on its nuclear program. Recent days have seen renewed focus on an interview with Rouhani, filmed earlier this year, in which the revolutionary-era cleric bragged that Iran was able to leverage negotiations he conducted in the 2000’s to develop Iran’s nuclear infrastructure. Tehran’s stance on its nuclear program is in any case set by Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, who has clarified that whatever room for negotiations he has given Rouhani, it stops short of anything that would prevent Iran from “advancement and realization of the Islamic Revolution and System.”
Jerusalem Post national security reporter Yaakov Lappin sees the upcoming series of planned rounds – which Western diplomats have said will test Rouhani’s seriousness and abilities – as potentially the last change to avoid military action aimed at the Iranian nuclear program:
The coming weeks probably represent the last opportunity for Iran and the international community to reach an enforceable deal that will dismantle Tehran’s nuclear weapons program, before Israel concludes that time has run out, that Iran has gotten too close to creating its first atomic bombs, and that the time for a military strike has arrived. Despite Iranian President Hassan Rouhani’s well-planned and deceptive charm offensive at the United Nations last week, so far not a single uranium-enriching centrifuge has stopped spinning in the underground nuclear facilities in Natanz and Qom. The heavy water plutonium facility at Arak is moving forward, and Iran has already amassed enough low-enriched uranium for the production of seven to nine atomic bombs.
[Photo: Ndunruh / Wiki Commons]
