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Saturday, 24 April 2021_A senior US National Security Council (NSC) official says Washington will not take pressure off until Iran’s nuclear program is capped and its remedial measures are reversed.
Speaking to American Jewish leaders on Friday, NSC coordinator for the Middle East and North Africa Brett McGurk stressed that Washington would remove no sanctions before it got commitments on the American demands.
“Until we get somewhere and until we have a firm commitment, and it’s very clear that Iran’s nuclear program is going to be capped, the problematic aspects reversed and back in a box, we are not going to take any of the pressure off,” he said.
A year after the US withdrawal from the 2015 nuclear deal and the Europeans' failure to support Iran, the Islamic Republic took a series of remedial measures in several stages as part of its legal rights stipulated in Articles 26 and 36 of the agreement.
Tehran and the remaining signatories of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) are holding talks in Vienna - with the new round to begin on Monday - with the aim of removing US sanctions and bringing Washington into line.
But despite the Biden administration's verbal pronouncement to undo former president Donald Trump's wrongs, Washington is showing a dogged willingness to maintain the sanctions as a tool of pressure.
Talks held have yielded no results so far, with Iran’s top negotiator saying there has been no agreement yet on how the sanctions will be removed or how their removal will be verified.
McGurk said, “There’s a very long way to go and this process is complicated.”
The US is “not going to pay anything upfront just to get a process going. We have to see from the Iranians a fundamental commitment and agreement to put their nuclear program back in a box that we can fully inspect and observe,” he added.
Iranian officials, however, have warned that Tehran would not accept "attritional negotiations".
The US has not been part of the discussions since it withdrew from the JCPOA in 2018, when former US president Donald Trump pulled his country out of the deal and imposed harsh economic sanctions on Iran.
American diplomats led by US special envoy for Iran Robert Malley have held talks with the other signatories to the JCPOA – except for Iran – in Vienna on the sidelines of the meetings of the Joint Commission.
Three working groups have been working on drafting a comprehensive list of the sanctions that the US would need to lift, the nuclear steps Iran would need to reverse, and the practical measures required to revitalize the agreement.
Turmp’s successor, Joe Biden, has claimed his administration is willing to rejoin the JCPOA, but has conditioned the move on Tehran’s resumption of the obligations suspended in retaliation for America’s unilateral withdrawal from the nuclear deal.
Tehran says Washington, as the first party that reneged on its commitments, should take the first step towards the JCPOA’s revival and unconditionally remove all the anti-Iran sanctions in a verifiable manner.
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