Iran, US set for nuclear talks in Oman
Iran and the United States will hold talks Friday in Oman, their latest over Tehran’s nuclear program, after Israel launched a 12-day war on the country in June and the Islamic Republic launched a bloody crackdown on nationwide protests.
US President Donald Trump has kept up pressure on Iran, suggesting America could attack Iran over the killing of peaceful demonstrators or if Tehran launches mass executions over the protests. Meanwhile, Trump has pushed Iran’s nuclear program back into the frame as well after the June war disrupted five rounds of talks held in Rome and Muscat, Oman, last year.
Trump began the diplomacy initially by writing a letter last year to Iran’s 86-year-old Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to jump-start these talks.
Khamenei has warned Iran would respond to any attack with an attack of its own, particularly as the theocracy he commands reels following the protests.
Ratcheting up sanctions
A previous letter from Trump during his first term drew an angry retort from the supreme leader.
But Trump’s letters to North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in his first term led to face-to-face meetings, though no deals to limit Pyongyang’s atomic bombs and a missile program capable of reaching the continental US.
Oman, a sultanate on the eastern edge of the Arabian Peninsula, has mediated talks between Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi and US Mideast envoy Steve Witkoff. The two men have met face-to-face after indirect talks, a rare occurrence due to the decades of tensions between the countries.
It hasn’t been all smooth, however. Witkoff at one point made a television appearance in which he suggested 3.67-percent enrichment for Iran could be something the countries could agree on.
But that’s exactly the terms set by the 2015 nuclear deal struck under former President Barack Obama, from which Trump unilaterally withdrew America.
Witkoff, Trump, and other American officials in the time since have maintained Iran can have no enrichment under any deal, something to which Tehran insists it won’t agree.
Those negotiations ended, however, with Israel launching the 12-day war in June on Iran, which included the US bombing Iranian nuclear sites.
Iran later acknowledged in November that the attacks saw it halt all uranium enrichment in the country, though inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) have been unable to visit the bombed sites.
Nationwide protests
Iran soon experienced protests that began in late December over the collapse of the country’s rial currency. Those demonstrations soon became nationwide, sparking Tehran to launch a bloody crackdown that killed thousands and saw tens of thousands detained by authorities.
Iran has insisted for decades that its nuclear program is peaceful. However, its officials increasingly threaten to pursue a nuclear weapon.
Iran now enriches uranium to near weapons-grade levels of 60 percent, the only country in the world without a nuclear weapons program to do so.
Under the original 2015 nuclear deal, Iran was allowed to enrich uranium up to 3.67-percent purity and to maintain a uranium stockpile of 300 kilograms (661 pounds).
The last report by the IAEA on Iran’s program put its stockpile at some 9,870 kg (21,760 pounds), with a fraction of it enriched to 60 percent.
US intelligence agencies assess that Iran has yet to begin a weapons program, but has “undertaken activities that better position it to produce a nuclear device, if it chooses to do so.”
