Iranian and US officials have signaled that talks in Vienna to resurrect the Iran nuclear deal are nearing a conclusion, raising expectations that the pact may be revived soon.
Ali Bagheri Kani, Iran’s main nuclear negotiator, said on Wednesday that the parties in Vienna are “closer than ever” to achieving an agreement.
The future of the pact, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), will be decided in the coming days, according to State Department spokesperson Ned Price in Washington.
Price stated, “Our opinion is that we are in the very late phases of, as I previously stated, a complicated negotiation with the main parties here.”
“We’ll be able to discern whether a mutual return to compliance with the JCPOA is in the offing or not during this critical period.”
“After weeks of hard talks, we are closer than ever to a deal; nothing is agreed until everything is agreed, though,” Kani wrote on Twitter around the same time Prince was delivering his remarks from the State Department.
The Iranian ambassador also urged his Vienna counterparts to avoid “intransigence” and to learn from the four years after former US President Donald Trump canceled the agreement. “It’s time for them to make some serious decisions,” he added.
Iran agreed to scale back its nuclear program in exchange for the removal of sanctions against its economy in a multilateral accord signed in 2015.
However, following Trump’s withdrawal from the agreement in 2018, the US has been enforcing a “maximum pressure” sanctions campaign on Iran. Iran has responded by stepping up its nuclear program, which includes uranium enrichment.
As part of an eighth round of talks earlier this month in Vienna, Washington and Tehran resumed indirect talks to resurrect the accord.
On Wednesday, Price reiterated the United States’ call for direct discussions to save the agreement.
“We’ve stated for a long time that direct negotiations in the context of Vienna would be to our benefit; it would be to the benefit of our efforts to achieve or at least test the premise of whether we can achieve mutual compliance with the JCPOA,” he said.