Amid questions of “will they/won’t they” about the prospects of U.S. talks with Iran over the nuclear program comes word from influential Iranian legislators and others that things are farther along than the public had been led to believe.
Senior MP Fadahosein Maleki, a former Ahmadinejad official, acknowledged perhaps for the first time in the past two years that Iran was holding both mediated and unmediated talks with the U.S. in Oman on a limited range of issues, but he provided no further details other than that he himself had been involved. According to him, the talks had been effective in getting the U.S. to release some of Iran’s frozen assets. Fellow MP Shahriar Heidari, a senior member of the Majles national security and foreign policy committee, saw indications in recent regional developments and the growing cooperation between Iran and the IAEA of future JCPoA talks in a third country, perhaps Vienna, Austria. Heidari emphasized Iran’s desire for direct U.S. involvement in the JCPoA talks, underscoring the importance of conducting negotiations prior to the U.S. presidential elections in November 2024 that could potentially derail the finalization of an agreement. Appearing slightly over-eager and perhaps jumping the gun, Heidari suggested the U.S. could even reopen its embassy in Tehran provided it “regretted” its past actions. Echoing Heidari’s concerns, political analyst Ali Nateqi argued that, in view of the upcoming presidential ballot, the White House is limited in openly advancing negotiations with Iran, hence the constraints on President Joe Biden’s future options. However, Nateqi believes the U.S. administration holds a favorable position on a compromise with Tehran, such as a “mini-deal” instead of a full-blown revival of the 2015 agreement. Indeed, the Iranian media have taken note of the assessment by the Wall Street Journal that Biden wants such a minor, unpublicized understanding with Iran that will not be subject to scrutiny by the Congress, where opponents—both Democrat and Republican—could mount a campaign against it. Citing the article in the WSJ by Laurence Norman and David S. Cloud, Eco Iran tracks the conversations of U.S. special envoy on Iran Robert Malley and Amir-Sa’id Iravani, the Iranian representative in New York. These began in late 2022 and continued thereafter, culminating in unpublicized meetings in Oman—presumably the ones that Maleki referred to above. Meanwhile, the financial arrangement that the U.S. has agreed to is for Iraq to discharge a portion of its debts to Iran by paying down Iran’s debts to Turkmenistan. A part of the funds would also cover Hajj expenses for Iranian pilgrims.
A more-or-less neutral player confirms the “seriousness” of both sides to come to the table. Sayyid Badr Albusaidi, the Omani foreign minister, has told Al-Monitor that Iran and the U.S. are close to ironing out their differences on three issues: Iran’s nuclear program, the release of dual nationals held in Iran, and the unfreezing of Iranian assets in South Korea and elsewhere. With a wistful look back, reformist former president Mohammad Khatami addressed fellow reformists in a message in which he noted that had Iran agreed to similar terms only two short years earlier, the gains would have been greater for the country. As it is, economist Mahmud Jamsaz is somewhat skeptical of claims by the administration and its supporters—like Maleki above—about the benefits of such an agreement for Iran. Jamsaz largely dismisses the so-called benefits as little more than propaganda on the part of the administration, pointing out that in the absence of Iran’s adherence to FATF, no short-term economic relief can be truly meaningful. All it gains for the administration is a stop-gap to plug the holes in the country’s deficit, without providing any solutions in the long term. Iran needs far more than the $17 billion in frozen assets or the $6.6 billion that CBI Governor Mohammadreza Farzin failed to obtain from the IMF. Jamsaz believes the Nezam needs an overhaul of its foreign policy.
