Tehran is willing to restart nuclear talks with Washington as long as it is treated with “dignity and respect”, Iran’s foreign minister has told the Guardian,
The Guardian reports.
Abbas Araghchi said only diplomacy worked, and disclosed fresh requests had come from intermediaries to reopen negotiations with the Trump administration. He said Iran did not have any undeclared nuclear sites, and Tehran could not yet allow the UN nuclear inspectorate to visit bombed nuclear sites for security reasons.
Araghchi is treading a difficult path since Iran does not want be seen to be acting from a position of weakness, and he insisted repeatedly that Iran had emerged stronger militarily and psychologically from the Israeli-US attack on its nuclear sites in June.
He was speaking at a security conference in Tehran where he restated that Iran had “an inalienable right to enrich uranium domestically that it will never give up” – the primary cause of the impasse in the previous talks.
The previous five rounds of talks between the US and Iran were brought to an abrupt and acrimonious end on 12 June when Israel, with US support, attacked Iranian nuclear sites in a 12-day war that ended with Donald Trump claiming the sites had been obliterated. Subsequently, European countries used their right to reimpose UN-wide sanctions, but Iran insists they have not had a major impact.
Iranian officials said they felt they had reached a “magic solution” to the enrichment issue in previous talks, when it was agreed an Iran-based consortium, with American involvement, could enrich uranium. Both sides would have been able to claim victory since domestic enrichment would have continued and the US could be confident that Iran’s nuclear programme was exclusively peaceful.
It had not been agreed in the talks that US nuclear scientists could operate inside Iran, but that was a logical implication of the consortium proposal. Officials claimed three times they had reached agreement with Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff only for the deal to collapse due to “spoilers in Washington”.
Iranian officials said the consortium offer was now off the table, but it seems highly likely the proposal could be revived in some form if talks reopen.
Trump last week said he had been receiving messages that Iran wanted to reopen negotiations, but privately Iranian officials say they are not yet receiving coherent offers from Washington either directly or from key regional mediators, such as Qatar, Egypt, Oman and Saudi Arabia. The Iranian foreign ministry has been accused of passivity in the face of Trump’s direct instinctive approach, but Tehran says diplomacy is not part of a show.
