Iran has ‘doubts’ about US intentions ahead of nuclear talks

Iran’s FM expresses concern about US motivations but says second round of negotiations will take place in Rome this weekend.

18 Apr 2025, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/4/18/iran-has-doubts-about-us-intentions-ahead-of-nuclear-talks

Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi has cast doubt over the intentions of the United States a day before a second round of nuclear talks is set to take place with Washington.

The new round will come a week after the two countries held their highest-level negotiations since US President Donald Trump unilaterally abandoned a 2015 landmark nuclear deal three years later. Iran has since abandoned all limits on its nuclear programme, and enriches uranium to up to 60 percent purity – near weapons-grade levels of 90 percent.

“Although we have serious doubts about the intentions and motivations of the American side, in any case, we will participate in tomorrow’s negotiations,” Araghchi said on Friday during a news conference in Moscow with his Russian counterpart, Sergey Lavrov.

Araghchi will set off on Saturday for Rome for a new round of Omani-mediated talks with US Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff.

“We are fully prepared to pursue a peaceful resolution for Iran’s peaceful nuclear programme,” Araghchi said.

Lavrov said Moscow was ready “to play any role that will be useful from Iran’s point of view and that will be acceptable to the United States”.

Russia, which commands the world’s largest confirmed arsenal of nuclear weapons, has deepened its military ties with Iran since it launched its offensive on Ukraine in February 2022, and has played a role in Iran’s nuclear negotiations in the past as a veto-wielding United Nations Security Council member.

Western countries, including the US, have long accused Iran of seeking to acquire nuclear weapons – an allegation Tehran has consistently denied, insisting that its programme is for peaceful civilian purposes.

Al Jazeera’s Tohid Asadi, reporting from Tehran, said there is “a cloud of mistrust in the air” despite statements made by Araghchi.

“With the talks ahead, there is a perception among Iranians that there is this mistrust that exists pertaining to the United States, but going back to the statement that were heard today … we saw a mix of doubt and hope at the same time,” Asadi said.

“Iran is saying it is not interested in putting other issues … [such as] defence capabilities … on the table of negotiations,” he added.

‘Unrealistic demands’

US President Donald Trump has threatened to attack Iran if it does not agree to a deal with the US.

On Tuesday, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps said the country’s military capabilities were off limits in the discussions.

The official IRNA news agency reported Iran’s regional influence and its missile capabilities, long criticised by Western governments, were among its “red lines” in the talks.

On Wednesday, the Iranian foreign minister said Iran’s enrichment of uranium was not up for discussion, after Witkoff called for it to end.

“If there is similar willingness on the other side, and they refrain from making unreasonable and unrealistic demands, I believe reaching an agreement is likely,” Araghchi said during Friday’s news conference.

Lavrov emphasised that any potential agreement should only pertain to the nuclear issue.

“This is a fundamental point that must be taken into account by those who try to burden the negotiations with non-nuclear issues and thus create a very risky situation,” he said.

Iran told the US during last week’s talks it was ready to accept some limits on its uranium enrichment, but needed watertight guarantees Trump would not again ditch the pact, an Iranian official told the Reuters news agency on Friday, speaking on condition of anonymity.

The official said Tehran’s red lines “mandated by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei” could not be compromised in the talks, adding that those red lines meant Iran would never agree to dismantle its centrifuges for enriching uranium, halt enrichment altogether, or reduce the amount of enriched uranium it stores to a level below the level it agreed in the 2015 deal.

It would also not negotiate over its missile programme, which Tehran views as outside the scope of any nuclear deal, Reuters reported.

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said earlier on Friday that the US administration is looking for a peaceful solution with Iran but will never tolerate the country developing a nuclear weapon.

Rubio met with British, French and German officials in Paris and pressed them to maintain sanctions against Iran instead of allowing them to run out.

Israel also reiterated its unwavering commitment to preventing Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons, saying it had a “clear course of action” to prevent this.

“Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and I, along with all relevant bodies, are committed to leading a clear course of action that will prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons,” Defence Minister Israel Katz said on Friday.

April 20, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Iran, politics international, USA | Leave a comment

Hopes for Iran nuclear talks tempered by threats and mixed messages

Parham Ghobadi, BBC Persian, BBC, 18 Apr 25

As Iran and the United States prepare to hold a second round of high-stakes nuclear talks in Rome, hopes for de-escalation are being tempered by mounting military threats and mixed messages.

US President Donald Trump reminds Tehran nearly every day of its options: a deal or war.

He has previously said Israel would lead a military response if the talks failed.

On Wednesday, the New York Times reported that Trump had “waved off” an Israeli plan to strike Iranian nuclear sites as early as next month.

“I wouldn’t say waved off. I’m not in a rush to do it,” Trump told reporters in response to the article on Thursday, adding that he preferred to give diplomacy a chance.

“I think that Iran has a chance to have a great country and to live happily without death… That’s my first option. If there’s a second option, I think it would be very bad for Iran.”

After both sides described the first round of talks in Oman last weekend as constructive, Trump had said he would be “making a decision on Iran very quickly”………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..

Atmosphere of distrust

Since Trump returned to office this year, Ayatollah Khamenei has consistently denounced negotiations with Washington.

“Negotiating with this administration is not logical, not wise, nor honourable,” he said in a February speech, just two months before agreeing to the current round of talks.

The supreme leader’s distrust stems from Trump’s withdrawal from the nuclear deal, the “maximum pressure” campaign that followed, and the assassination of General Qassem Soleimani in a US strike in Iraq in 2020.

Ayatollah Khamenei expressed satisfaction with the first round of talks, saying it was “implemented well”.

But he cautioned that he was “neither overly optimistic nor overly pessimistic”……………………………………………………. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cwy7n905jqdo

April 20, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Iran, politics international, USA | Leave a comment

US envoy calls for Iran to ‘eliminate’ nuclear programme

 US envoy Steve Witkoff said on Tuesday that Iran “must stop and
eliminate” its nuclear enrichment programme to secure a deal with Donald
Trump after previously hinting that Washington might be willing to soften
its stance. “A deal with Iran will only be completed if it is a Trump
deal,” Witkoff said on social media platform X as he appeared to
backtrack on his previous comments. “It is imperative for the world that
we create a tough, fair deal that will endure.”

 FT 15th April 2025, https://www.ft.com/content/5fa3707d-7952-464f-a67c-37ddfc061ed5

April 19, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Iran, politics international, USA | Leave a comment

Trump’s Iran talks can succeed if the administration embraces reality rather than myth

What is routinely absent from the conversation is that one of the people who agrees, at least for the moment, that Iran must not have a nuclear weapon is Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The fatwa (ruling under Islamic law) he issued dates back to at least 2003 and as much as a decade before that.

The talks between Iran and the U.S. set to begin today have a chance to succeed if the Trump administration grounds its policy in the realities of Iran’s nuclear program, not fearmongering promoted by Israel and its allies.

By Mitchell Plitnick  April 12, 2025, Mitchell Plitnick, https://mondoweiss.net/2025/04/trumps-iran-talks-can-succeed-if-the-administration-embraces-reality-rather-than-myth/

Mitchell Plitnick is the president of ReThinking Foreign Policy. He is the co-author, with Marc Lamont Hill, of Except for Palestine: The Limits of Progressive Politics. Mitchell’s previous positions include vice president at the Foundation for Middle East Peace, Director of the US Office of B’Tselem, and Co-Director of Jewish Voice for Peace. You can find him on Twitter @MJPlitnick.

Iran and the United States are set to meet indirectly on today in Oman, in the hopes of finding a way to resolve their confrontations over Iran’s nuclear program without a resort to an “Israeli-led” attack on Iran. 

There are a lot of details to parse if these discussions are to bear fruit. It will be important to see whether each side—though most of the concern here really lays with the American side—is willing, at least in the context of these talks, to deal with realities over propaganda and pragmatism over sloganeering.

These talks are different from earlier ones. High-level officials from Donald Trump’s administration are leading these talks. Trump’s schizophrenic approach to policy makes negotiations volatile but also leaves open possibilities for breakthroughs.

Netanyahu sidelined

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to Washington earlier this week clearly indicated the potential here. 

Netanyahu came with the proper fealty to Trump, kissing the proverbial ring. He desperately needed a boost from Trump as protests and scandals swirled around him in Israel. He also needed Trump to back his aggressive stance against Iran, a crucial point in ensuring the perpetual state of active war that Netanyahu needs to forestall elections next year and to continue to delay his trials in court and investigations of his administration’s failures. 

He got none of it. Only hours before Netanyahu was to meet with Trump, he was told that Trump was going to hold talks with Iran to avert war. The large press conference that was scheduled for the two leaders was quickly reduced to a small group of hand-picked “journalists.” 

 At that mini-conference, Netanyahu was clearly discomfited by Trump’s mention of negotiations with Iran. It got worse for him as Trump mildly rebuked Netanyahu on his reluctance to engage with Türkiye over both countries (illegal) presences in Syria. It’s worth noting how quickly Israel and Türkiye started productive talks after that. 

There was a clear message that Trump was sending, although he didn’t use the same kind of language that got one of his negotiators into trouble a few weeks ago: Israel is not going to drive this process. The United States is.

More precisely, Netanyahu is not going to drive the process; Trump is. Trump later clarified Israel’s role. After saying that the U.S. will use a military option against Iran if necessary, Trump said, “Israel will obviously be very much involved in that — it’ll be the leader of that. But nobody leads us. We do what we want to do.”

Trump will allow the Israeli military to take the lead, and the risks, while he expects that the U.S. will be a full partner in the planning and strategizing of an attack, and offer the needed support while not risking backlash from Trump’s own base should American military personnel be injured or killed in another “foreign war.”

So Netanyahu is now reduced to trying to sabotage a diplomatic process that is out of his hands in the hope of provoking a military confrontation that he will not be able to drive but merely partner in. After four years of Joe Biden needlessly acquiescing to every Israeli desire, this is an unwelcome change for Netanyahu.

It is ironic that the Democratic administration, which claimed to defend the “rules-based order,” and claimed to respect established political traditions domestically, routinely broke U.S. law and quite possibly delivered the death blow to both the “rules-based” post-Cold War order and to the international legal system; while Trump’s Republican administration, which has openly defied the rule of law, has moved quickly and decisively into brutal authoritarianism and blatant racism, is restraining Israels’ relentless push for a regional war, at least for the moment.

A fictional crisis

Yet, on the whole, and in their effects on the ground, Trump’s policies have not been much different materially in Gaza, or even with Iran, from Biden’s. And one of those similarities is the ongoing denial of the fictional basis of the Iranian “nuclear threat.”

That “Iran must not be allowed to obtain a nuclear weapon” is a mantra we hear every day, and also a point that most people agree with, even if, for some of us, it is not so much about “allowing” Iran a nuke, as it is that no one should have these awful weapons and the last thing we need is another country, friend or foe, possessing them.

What is routinely absent from the conversation is that one of the people who agrees, at least for the moment, that Iran must not have a nuclear weapon is Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The fatwa (ruling under Islamic law) he issued dates back to at least 2003 and as much as a decade before that. 

There are, of course, those who think the fatwa is just words and others who believe it to be deception. So, if further proof is needed, the United States has provided it. 

The United States intelligence services confirmed in 2007 that Iran had formally abandoned the pursuit of nuclear weapons technology in 2003. 

That intelligence assessment has been repeatedly confirmed ever since, most recently by Trump’s own Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard in testimony before Congress. “The IC (Intelligence Community) continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme Leader Khamenei has not authorized the nuclear weapons program he suspended in 2003,” she said. 

It can’t be any clearer. Gabbard is here representing eighteen different American intelligence agencies. There has been no pushback from that entire community on her statement. 

Of course, there is no shortage of bad faith actors who will say that all of this doesn’t matter because Iran is evil and so every bad thing anyone thinks about them must be true. 

Those forces feed off the fact that Iran has enriched uranium to near-weapons grade and always, without fail, decline to mention that they have only done that because the United States abrogated the 2015 Iran nuclear deal (called the JCPOA) and reinstated crippling sanctions and that Iran’s only way to retaliate at all was to also take the steps that were denied it by the JCPOA.3

Again, we need to recall that it was Donald Trump who, for no reason other than his wish to reverse any positive step by his then-immediate predecessor Barack Obama, tore up the JCPOA. He did this despite the statement by his own top aides, such as then-Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, who told a House of Representatives hearing, “I believe that they fundamentally are (in compliance). There have been certainly some areas where they were not temporarily in that regard, but overall our intelligence community believes that they have been compliant, and the IAEA also says so.”

Six months later, Mattis said it again, even while Trump was getting ready to scrap the deal. He told a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing, “I’ve read (the JCPOA) now three times … and I will say that it is written almost with an assumption that Iran would try to cheat…So the verification, what is in there, is actually pretty robust as far as our intrusive ability” to inspect and supervise the Iranian nuclear facilities and program.

This isn’t just about getting history right. This is the perspective that Iran is bringing to the talks, one that is confirmed by Trump’s own people when they are forced to speak the truth rather than just say whatever their boss wants them to say. 

This perspective was never brought to the Biden administration’s dealings with Iran, despite Biden having been fully immersed in the JCPOA talks as Obama’s vice president.

If Trump wants to avoid the military conflict that he has already primed American military forces in the region for, his negotiators need to appreciate the reality that the only steps Iran has taken toward a nuclear weapon since 2003 are entirely due to the U.S.’ refusal to live up to the deal it pushed for and got in 2015.

Netanyahu’s Libya option

Another reality Trump needs to recognize is the message that has been sent to countries that surrender their nuclear deterrent. 

Ukraine is an obvious current example. Of the many ways the West betrayed Ukraine’s trust after the collapse of the Soviet Union, a big one is the neglect of Ukrainian security, particularly between 1995 and 2014, that was promised to Kyiv in exchange for their agreement to give up the Soviet nuclear weapons they possessed. 

That didn’t work out well for Gaddafi or Libya, and the state itself remains divided and unstable to this day. 

This explains some of what Gabbard was talking about when, later in her recent testimony, she said, “In the past year, we have seen an erosion of a decades-long taboo in Iran on discussing nuclear weapons in public, likely emboldening nuclear weapons advocates within Iran’s decision-making apparatus.” 

If Iran should agree, as it did in 2015, to surrender its entire nuclear weapons program, does the same fate await it as those of Libya and Ukraine? Given that its enemies, the U.S. and Israel, both have nuclear arsenals as well as massive stores of both conventional weapons and WMDs and have wreaked unimaginable destruction around the world and in the Middle East specifically, it is a real concern, and one that the country, both in the public and governmental discourses, would be irresponsible not to discuss and consider. 

This must inform the American approach to the talks in Oman. Benjamin Netanyahu is one person who knows that. 

To save face, and to give the impression that what he says is going to matter to Trump, Netanyahu spoke to the issue of U.S.-Iran talks after he left Washington. He said, “Iran will not have nuclear weapons. This can be done by agreement, but only if the agreement is a Libya-style agreement (where international and American agencies) go in, blow up the facilities, dismantle all the equipment, under American supervision with American execution. That is good.”

Netanyahu wants Iran’s entire nuclear program destroyed, including the civilian aspect. That’s a non-starter for Iran. While nuclear power accounts for only a small portion of Iran’s electricity use, it is expected to grow in coming years as even more of its oil will be exported in an attempt to rebuild its shattered economy. 

Anti-Iran hawks are going to push the “Libya option.” Iran, for its part, will need to find the space to agree to the sort of intrusive inspections it allowed in 2015, at least, and probably some other concessions for Trump to show off. They very likely know that. And if the U.S. wants that agreement, it will need to commit to ending sanctions more reliably than it did in 2015.

That path is reasonable, it is a win for Iran, and Trump can sell it as a triumph. It’s there for the taking, but only if Trump does something well outside of both his and, for the most part, the U.S.’s comfort zone: act in good faith and grounded in reality rather than myth. 

April 15, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Iran, politics international, USA | Leave a comment

Iran says ‘indirect talks’ have taken place with US over nuclear programme – with more to follow

The talks come after US President Donald Trump warned Iran it would be in “great danger” if a deal wasn’t reached between the two countries.

 Sky News 1 13 April 2025

The discussions on Saturday took place in Muscat, Oman, with the host nation’s officials mediating between representatives of Iran and the US, who were seated in separate rooms, according to Esmail Baghaei, a spokesperson for Iran’s foreign ministry.

After the meeting, Oman’s foreign minister Sayyid Badr Albusaidi thanked Iran’s foreign minister Abbas Araghchi and US Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff for joining the negotiations aimed at “global peace, security and stability”, in an X post.

“We will continue to work together and put further efforts to assist in arriving at this goal,” he added.

‘Very positive’ and ‘constructive’

Iranian state media claimed the US and Iranian officials “briefly spoke in the presence of the Omani foreign minister” at the end of the talks – a claim Mr Araghchi echoed in a statement on Telegram.

He said the talks took place in a “constructive atmosphere based on mutual respect” and that they would continue next week.

Speaking on board Air Force One on Saturday US President Donald Trump said the “talks are going okay”……………………………………………………..

Reuters news agency said an Omani source told it the talks were focused on de-escalating regional tensions, prisoner exchanges and limited agreements to ease sanctions in exchange for controlling Iran’s nuclear programme.

‘Great danger’ if talks fail

Donald Trump has insisted Tehran cannot get nuclear weapons.

He said on Monday the talks would be direct, but Tehran officials insisted it would be conducted through an intermediary.

Mr Trump also warned Iran would be in “great danger” if negotiations fail…………….

He added Iran “cannot have a nuclear weapon, and if the talks aren’t successful, I actually think it will be a very bad day for Iran”.

The comments came after Mr Trump’s previous warnings of possible military action against Iran if there is no deal over its nuclear programme. https://news.sky.com/story/iran-says-indirect-talks-taking-place-with-us-over-nuclear-programme-13347051

April 15, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Iran, politics international, USA | Leave a comment