by Arshad Mohammed and Humeyra Pamuk
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S., Iranian and European officials said on Thursday that significant differences remained between Washington and Tehran over a return to the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, though a U.S. official said a deal within a few weeks was possible if Iran was willing.
“Is it possible to see a mutual return to respect (of the agreement) in the coming weeks, or an agreement on mutual respect? Yes, it is possible,” a senior US State Department official said. .
Speaking on condition of anonymity on a conference call with reporters, he added that “only time will tell” if this hypothesis is likely. “At the end of the day, this is a political decision that has to be taken in Iran.”
US Foreign Minister Antony Blinken said Washington was unsure whether Tehran was willing to make the decisions necessary for the two sides to return under the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPoA) concluded in Vienna in July 2015.
“The jury is out,” he said in an interview with NBC News, according to excerpts released in advance.
In Tehran, the chief nuclear negotiator said there was still a long way to go. “What will happen is impossible to predict and a timetable cannot be established,” Abbas Araqchi told Iranian public television.
“Iran is trying to make this happen as soon as possible, but we will not do anything in a rush,” he continued.
A fourth round of indirect talks opens Friday in Vienna between US and Iranian officials, about two years after former US President Donald Trump denounced the JCPOA and reinstated US sanctions against Iran, pushing it to s ” freeing them in stages since 2019 from the terms of the agreement.
According to a European diplomat, Washington has formulated a comprehensive proposal including the withdrawal of sanctions against key areas, such as oil and the banking sector, and has hinted at its openness to sanctions related to terrorism and human rights. .
He added, on condition of anonymity, that Tehran had not expressed a desire to truncate the expertise it may have acquired with the work of its advanced centrifuges, nor to destroy them.
The European diplomat said that within the ranks of the West, a theory was beginning to spread that the Iranian negotiating delegation had no leeway and the Supreme Leader of the Revolution, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, believed that Tehran could get more from Washington and was not rushing until the Iranian elections on June 18.
(Arshad Mohammed and Humeyra Pamuk, with Parisa Hafezi in Dubai and John irish in Paris; French version Jean Terzian)
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