Comment The Biden administration has completed its review of the proposed “final” text of a renewed nuclear deal with Iran, and Iran’s response to the proposal, and has sent its response to the European Union’s negotiating coordinators, the State Department said Wednesday. Iran said it had begun its own “detailed review” of the US response, according to Foreign Ministry spokesman Nasser Kanaani. The negotiation of the response documents marked the latest step in an apparent endgame after nearly a year and a half of negotiations to return to the 2015 deal — lifting sanctions on Iran in exchange for it submitting to strict limits on its nuclear program and international monitoring — without any guarantee that a new agreement will be reached. “We’re closer now than we were just a few weeks ago,” National Security Council communications coordinator John Kirby told reporters. “The gaps remain. We’re not there yet.” The US move came as Israel, whose national security adviser was consulting in Washington this week, reiterated its opposition to the deal. Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid, speaking to reporters Wednesday in Jerusalem, said his government “is not against any deal. We are against this agreement, because it is bad. Because it cannot be accepted as it is currently written.” US officials said the terms of the new text are largely an update of the original agreement. President Donald Trump pulled the United States out of the deal in 2018, reimposing hefty sanctions and adding many more. In response, Iran resumed its pre-deal nuclear program and accelerated it, increasing the quantity and quality of uranium enrichment far beyond the prescribed limits it had previously adhered to and blocking some inspection measures. Experts are urging a return to the Iran nuclear deal as the outlook is dim Israel, and opponents of a new deal in Congress, have said that lifting nuclear-related sanctions would provide Iran with hundreds of billions of dollars to finance terrorist activities and that an early end to some of its provisions would allow Iran to quickly to revive plans to build a nuclear weapon. Administration officials dispute the dollar’s calculations and say that reinstating limits on Iran’s nuclear program, even with some end dates, would provide several years of relief from a looming nuclear threat and room for further negotiations. Iran has said its program is for peaceful purposes only and that it has no plans to build a weapon. State Department spokesman Ned Price announced the sending of the US response to EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell, but did not elaborate on its content. Borrell, in charge of orchestrating the negotiations, drew up the final text last month, saying all possible compromises had already been reached. Iran sent a response early last week that Borrell called “reasonable,” but with some proposed “adjustments.” Kirby also declined to elaborate on the US response. “We’re not going to want to negotiate this thing publicly,” he said. “I don’t have an answer to speak of today and I don’t know that we ever will.” Kirby acknowledged that Iran had previously “made some concessions that allowed us to get to where we are in the process,” including the rejection of its request that the United States remove a terrorist designation against the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, a division of the Iranian Army. Most of Iran’s proposed adjustments involve which of the thousands of U.S. sanctions the administration is prepared to lift and when, according to people familiar with the matter, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive diplomacy. That leaves the heart of the dispute where it has been from the beginning — between the United States and Iran — with other parties to the original deal, including Britain, France, Germany, Russia and China, largely bystanders. As in the original deal, the United States said it would only lift sanctions related to Iran’s nuclear program. “It’s important for people to remember that what we’re talking about here is a return to the JCPOA,” said Kirby, short for the original Community Comprehensive Plan of Action. Iran must “stop spinning the centrifuges” used to enrich uranium, “get rid of its enriched uranium” and agree to inspections, he said. “Yes, there is sanctions relief,” but “this deal is about their potential weapons capability. That’s where it was in 2015, that’s where it is today,” he said. As it is written, it does not eliminate or reduce “the numerous sanctions that are in place today and will remain in place … or preclude us from imposing others.” Russia and China have said they would support the final text as written. Following a phone call between President Biden and his British, French and German counterparts last weekend, the administration said the Europeans agreed with the US response. Throughout the talks, Iran refused direct negotiations with the United States and the Europeans acted as intermediaries. Iran has also continued to demand that the International Atomic Energy Agency halt its investigation into radioactive traces found several years ago at several undeclared locations inside the country. Although a separate issue from the JCPOA, Iran has said it will not implement a new nuclear deal unless research is halted. Iran’s refusal to cooperate with the IAEA investigation led to a resolution of censure this year by the agency’s governing board. “No agreement will be implemented until the IAEA Board of Directors has definitively closed the false accusations file. Iran’s nuclear program will not be dismantled,” Seyed Mohammad Marandi, a member of Iran’s negotiating team, said on Twitter on Tuesday. Earlier in the week, IAEA director-general Rafael Mariano Grossi said the investigation would continue. “So far, Iran has not given us the technically credible explanations we need to explain the origin of many traces of uranium,” he told CNN. “Let’s have an explanation. If there was nuclear material there, where is it now?’ Biden campaigned on a promise to revive the original deal. Start-stop negotiations began in April 2021, only to be halted after a few months for Iranian elections, which brought hardline President Ebrahim Raisi to power. Amid protracted negotiations over which US sanctions to lift, talks that resumed towards the end of the year included an Iranian demand that Biden guarantee that no subsequent US administration would pull out of a renewed deal – something he found impossible to do. Iran is still seeking some sort of guarantee, according to people familiar with the talks. Shira Rubin in Jerusalem contributed to this report.
