Negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program just got more interesting. And if U.S. President Joe Biden wants them to succeed, he should insist they proceed with one fewer member.
The news from Vienna this week is about a recording made in March for an oral history project. On the recording, which was first leaked to the Persian news channel Iran International and then the New York Times, Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif acknowledges that he was often undermined and overruled by his country’s own security forces in negotiating the 2015 nuclear deal. The disclosure proved a point critics of those negotiations have often made: Zarif is merely a representative of, not a counterbalance to, Iran’s hard-liners.
The most revealing moment of the recording involves Russia’s opposition to the 2015 nuclear agreement. Zarif says that Russia "put all its weight” against the deal because, as the Times dryly explains, "it was not in Moscow’s interests for Iran to normalize relations with the West.” That is an extraordinary admission considering that Russia was one of six countries negotiating the deal with Iran.
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