nuclear-news

Iran desperately needs a nuclear deal to save its battered economy

The Islamic Republic has few good options – a nuclear accord 2.0 may be its best hope

By Michael Day, iNews 4th Sept 2024

Iran appears increasingly willing to scale back its nuclear weapons programme in return for sanctions relief to rescue its stricken economy. This might explain Tehran’s reluctance to retaliate hard against Israel’s alleged assassination of a senior Hamas figure.

The delay in Iran’s threatened retribution for the provocative killing of Hamas’s political leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran on 31 July has been explained in part by Tehran’s willingness to allow negotiators to pursue peace talks between Hamas and Israel.

America’s increased naval presence in the region with aircraft carriers and a guided missile-capable submarine might also have made the regime in Tehran think long and hard about how it should respond to Haniyeh’s killing……………………

Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, allowed the election of a moderate president, Masoud Pezeshkian, in July, after deciding that a degree of rapprochement and thereby sanctions relief with the West was badly needed to tackled Iran’s dire economic situation and the social unrest that it – along with the regime’s brutality – has created.

………………………now Azizi thinks: “Iran is seriously interested in pursuing agreements with the West that could help it lift sanctions and this is indeed a priority for it. The return of the JCPOA [2015 nuclear deal] triumvirate (Iran’s nuclear negotiators Mohammad Javad Zarif, Abbas Araghchi, Majid Takht-Ravanchi) indeed speaks to that”.

The nuclear deal was concluded with world powers in 2015 under Iran’s former president Hassan Rouhani – an accord ripped up by the Trump administration in 2018.

Underlining the regime’s desire to use a freeze in its nuclear programme as a bargaining chip, Pezeshkian is, according to reports in state media, about to appoint the nuclear negotiations specialist Takht-Ravanchi to a senior role in the foreign affairs department.

The news comes a week after Iran’s supreme leader suggested that his country might resume nuclear negotiations with the US.

…………………………………………………………………………………………….there is of course the seismic matter of the US election result, which is likely to have a huge bearing on America’s willingness to deal with Tehran. Nothing concrete will be agreed on before then. https://inews.co.uk/news/world/iran-nuclear-deal-sanctions-relief-economy-3258961

September 5, 2024 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | Iran, politics international