Post #5635

“Trump Is Upbeat Before the Upcoming Tehran Talks, But He’s Prepared For the Worst” 🔤🔤🔤🔤1️⃣ If talks between Iran and the US reconvene within the next few days in Islamabad, Trump will have two major political hurdles to overcome – first showing that any deal he secures is better than the one signed by Obama in 2015 and from which he withdraw in 2018, and secondly proving the deal is more favourable than the one on offer in Geneva in February before he launched his war. Otherwise he will have inflicted massive damage on the world economy when alternatives were available that were less costly in blood and treasure. He will also have to show that Iran has made no permanent gain by taking control of shipping passing through the strait of Hormuz. These are the yardsticks, or tests, around which his negotiating team will be keeping an anxious eye. In one respect, any Islamabad deal will be better than the JCPOA since it will contain no sunset clauses, one of Trump’s major criticisms of the Obama deal. The new deal will have datelines for specific events to be triggered, but overall the deal is intended to be for ever. These are broadly four sticking points on which the Trump team will aim to claim progress over his hated Democrat predecessor. The first is Iran’s domestic enrichment of uranium. In the Geneva talks held on 26 February the two sides provisionally reached a position whereby the US team, on Trump’s instruction, demanded Iran suspend all domestic enrichment for 10 years. Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, indicated he thought three years was the maximum the Iranian system would wear. The US in last week’s talks in Islamabad raised their demand to a 20-year suspension, and Trump in a New York Post interview said he “did not like the 20-year offer”, and wanted the ban on enrichment to be permanent. In practice, nobody knows how long it would take Iran, given the damage inflicted on its key enrichment facilities, to start enriching again. In the 2015 talks Obama conceded Iran could enrich for 15 years, but only at the level of purity required for a civilian nuclear programme – 3.67%. The agreement did not explicitly grant Iran a right to enrich as a point of principle. The second issue is Iran’s stockpile of highly enriched uranium. The 2015 JCPOA limited Iran’s stockpile of uranium at 3.65% to 300kg. Now Iran has 440.9kg of uranium enriched to 60% uranium-235, a level that can be quickly enriched to weapons-grade – 90%. Nearly all of the 60% material is in gas form (UF6) and stored in small canisters, roughly the size of a scuba tank. Iran says that from July 2019 it built this stockpile at these higher purity levels as a bargaining chip in response to the US and Europe’s failure to lift sanctions as promised in the 2015 deal. #trump#iran#peacetalks#islamabad#obama 📱American Оbserver - Stay up to date on all important events 🇺🇸