If you listen closely, and if the wind comes in from the right direction, you can hear the sound of the mullahs in Iran laughing their sandals off.
Iran managed to pen a joint statement with the EU. It is vague and ultimately unenforceable, which is the only kind of statement Iran would agree to. But Iran and the EU negotiators now have something they’ve put all their names on, and the U.S. is not a party to it.
I have no doubt that John Kerry and the U.S. delegation did present what’s in their fact sheet to Iran during the negotiations. But Iran has left the talks without signaling agreement with the U.S. on anything.
And Zarif is at pains to quickly disavow any such agreement, which we should find informative. To cut to the chase, Iran is laying the groundwork for undermining the sanctions regime through the EU, regardless of what the U.S. does. The U.S. Congress may be a nut Iran can’t crack, but if the EU is split from the United States, just about everyone else that’s still enforcing the UN sanctions will follow the EU’s lead.
The split in the West is the top point to remember about the failure of this round of talks. It is virtually certain to be irreparable.
Iran gains time, and splits the West, with another non-deal
By J.E. Dyer on April 3, 2015 at 12:22 am
Obama Munich
Once again, Obama has announced a “deal,” when in fact what has happened is that Iran has gained more time, has made no meaningful concessions, and has effectively split the Western negotiators. This latter outcome is getting no attention as of yet, but is the most important.
The U.S. has made concessions, of course. The upshot of them is that Iran gains time. We have imposed a fatal condition on ourselves: going forward, we won’t continue pressing for Iran to shutter the uranium enrichment facility at Fordo, in a mountainside near Qom, or to cease building the plutonium reactor at Arak.
(Bret Stephens and many others point out that Obama specifically named both sites as facilities Iran needed to give up, to demonstrate truly peaceful intentions with her nuclear program. We’ve given them up as bargaining points instead.)
The State Department is presenting this as an agreement made in exchange for a detailed commitment by Iran to not enrich uranium at Fordo, and to allow inspections. Besides the fact that these terms are unenforceable, however, there is the inconvenient fact that Iran does not confirm that she has made this agreement.
Just like last time (see first link above), Iran has come out promptly to accuse the U.S. of lying about the deal. Iran’s chief negotiator, Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, describes the State Department fact sheet on the “deal” as “spin.” This alone is singularly unpropitious.
The explanation is straightforward, however. Iran didn’t actually agree to what the U.S. State Department has put out today. John Bolton clarified this on Fox a couple of hours ago. Nothing has been jointly signed or published by the U.S. and Iran. Only one document has Iran’s explicit concurrence, and that is a joint statement with the EU.
Although the EU-Iran statement mentions both the Fordo facility and the Arak reactor, it differs from the State Department fact sheet in two key ways. One is that it does not contain all the fanciful detail, about these and other issues, included in the State Department fact sheet.
