US Politicians Cross Swords As Iran Nuclear Talks Reach Endgame

Republican House member Claudia Tenney said Malley’s briefing had left her with “more questions than answers” and demanded the envoy testify openly to give details of what the US was “offering” in Vienna.

By contrast, Democratic Party Senator Chris Murphy said that what Malley had said about Iran’s expanding nuclear program outside JCPOA limits had been “sobering and shocking” and had confirmed his support for reviving it.

Officials in President Joe Biden’s administration have referred to importance of consulting both with overseas allies and at home. Jalina Porter, the State department principal deputy spokesperson, told a press briefing Tuesday that Biden considered “a bipartisan approach to Iran” as “the strongest way to safeguard US interests for the long term.”

Porter promised that a US return to the JCPOA would involve considering legal implications, including the Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act, which Republican senators this week pointed out requires the president to submit to Congress any ‘new’ agreement.

In Vienna, with talks resuming Tuesday after a break since January 28, several officials claimed that agreement on restoring the deal was in sight.White House press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters Wednesday that talks were at an urgent point.

CNN cited three US officials Wednesday that agreement was needed by the end of February before the US “changed tack.” Tehran has consistently rejected what it calls “artificial deadlines.”

Describing the Vienna process Tuesday, the European foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said there had been a “US offer” and a “counteroffer.” He said both Iran and the US had been “showing willingness” as the final stage approached: “I don’t know if it’s going to be one week, two weeks, three weeks, but certainly we are in the last steps of the negotiation.”

Limiting ‘break out’ time

Speculation this week has centered on the ‘break out’ time the US would require as underlying any renewed agreement. When the JCPOA was inked in 2015, US experts calculated the deal’s restrictions meant it would take Iran a year to assemble enough sufficiently enriched uranium for a crude bomb.

A restored JCPOA would not achieve the same break out time as in 2015, experts say, because of the advances Iran has made in its expertise, but they say it would extend the current break out time, which some put at weeks rather than months.

“Even if the original terms of the JCPOA can be reimposed, Iran will have cleared many of the technical hurdles that enabled the original agreement to put Iran at least one year away from a weapons capability,” Jon Wolfsthal, a special advisor to Vice-President Biden on nonproliferation,” wrote this week in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. “An inability to recreate a one-year breakout timeline is the price that the world must pay for President Trump’s decision to withdraw from the carefully negotiated and verified agreement.”