China, France, Germany, Russia, the United Kingdom and Iran will hold a meeting regarding the United States' possible return to the 2015 nuclear deal after former American President Donald Trump unilaterally withdrew from the agreement and imposed sanctions on Tehran.
The remaining parties of the Iran nuclear deal took part in the virtual meeting Friday chaired by the European Union diplomatic corps' deputy secretary-general Enrique Mora. World powers and Iran agreed to meet for further talks next week in Vienna.
Participants are to discuss the prospect of Washington's potential return and "how to ensure the full and effective implementation of the agreement by all sides," a statement sent out by the EU's diplomatic service on Thursday said.
They said they "emphasized their commitment to preserve the JCPOA (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action) and discussed modalities to ensure the return to its full and effective implementation," according to a statement after their virtual meeting. The statement also said that the group’s coordinator "will also intensify separate contacts in Vienna" with all participants of the nuclear agreement and the United States, as The Associated Press (AP) reported.
In Tehran, state television quoted Abbas Araghchi, Iran's nuclear negotiator in the Friday virtual meeting, as saying in the meeting that any "return by the U.S. to the nuclear deal does not require any negotiation and the path is quite clear."
"The U.S. can return to the deal and stop breaching the law in the same way it withdrew from the deal and imposed illegal sanctions on Iran," Araghchi said.
Tehran also rejected any meeting with the United States in Vienna, an Iranian Foreign Ministry website reported.
"The United States will not attend any meeting in which Iran is present, including the meeting of the joint commission (of the nuclear accord), and that is certain," Araqchi was quoted as saying by the website. "It is their business, whether other parties to the (nuclear accord) seek to consult bilaterally or multilaterally with the United States ... whether in Vienna or elsewhere," Araqchi added, according to Reuters. "The Iranian delegation will not have any talks with the U.S. delegation at any level."
Russia's ambassador to international organizations in Vienna, Mikhail Ulyanov, said that "the impression is that we are on the right track, but the way ahead will not be easy and will require intensive efforts. The stakeholders seem to be ready for that."
The Iran nuclear deal was negotiated in 2015 to prevent the country from developing nuclear weapons in exchange for the lifting of crippling economic sanctions. Trump pulled out in May 2018 and reimposed heavy sanctions, plunging oil-rich Iran into an acute economic crisis, more recently exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic. In response, Iran has been incrementally violating the terms of the agreement since 2019, including higher uranium enrichment and uranium metal production.
President Joe Biden has indicated that the U.S. would be willing to rejoin but there are complications. Iran has been steadily violating the restrictions of the deal, like the amount of enriched uranium it can stockpile and the purity to which it can enrich it.
Tehran’s moves have been calculated to put pressure on the other nations in the deal – Russia, China, France, Germany and Britain – to do more to offset crippling sanctions reimposed under Trump.
Iran has said that before it resumes compliance with the deal, the U.S. needs to return to its own obligations under the deal by dropping the sanctions. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has said that over the past two years, Iran has accumulated a lot of nuclear material and new capacities, and used the time for "honing their skills in these areas."
The ultimate goal of the deal is to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear bomb, something it insists it doesn’t want to do. Iran now has enough enriched uranium to make a bomb, but nowhere near the amount it had before the nuclear deal was signed. As part of its ongoing violations of the JCPOA, Iran last month began restricting IAEA inspections of its nuclear facilities.
Under a last-minute deal worked out during a trip to Tehran, however, some access was preserved. Under that temporary agreement, Iran will no longer share surveillance footage of its nuclear facilities with the IAEA, but it has promised to preserve the tapes for three months. It will then hand them over to the Vienna-based United Nations atomic watchdog if it is granted sanctions relief.
Otherwise, Iran has vowed to erase the tapes, narrowing the window for a diplomatic breakthrough.