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US Secretary of State John Kerry is due to meet his Iranian counterpart in Geneva in a bid to revive stalled talks over Iran's nuclear programme. The BBC reports:
Mr Kerry says his meeting with Mohammad Javad Zarif is to "take stock" ahead of a new round of talks on Thursday. Six world powers want Iran to curb its nuclear programme in return for the lifting of sanctions.
An interim deal was struck in November 2013 but two previous deadlines for a comprehensive deal have been missed. The aim now is to reach a high-level political agreement by 1 March and confirm the full technical details of the agreement by 1 July.
Iran is subject to economic sanctions amid fears that it is trying to develop a nuclear weapon. It insists its nuclear programme is for peaceful purposes. Speaking in India on Monday before he flew to Pakistan and then on to Switzerland, Mr Kerry said he hoped to be able to "accelerate the process to make greater progress".
"We are at a juncture where most of the issues are now getting fleshed out and understood," he said. A fresh round of talks between Iran and the five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany (P5+1) is to begin in Geneva on Thursday.
The United States and its allies will make another attempt this week to reach an agreement with Iran that prevents it from developing nuclear weapons in exchange for the lifting of international sanctions, but sealing such a deal isn't likely to be easy, some experts say. Voice of America writes:
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry will meet with his Iranian counterpart, Foreign Minister Mohammed Javad Zarif, on Wednesday in Geneva to discuss the negotiations between Tehran and the P5+1 group — the United States, Britain, China, France, Russia and Germany — which will resume in the Swiss city later in the week.
Middle East expert James Phillips of the Heritage Foundation said that "at best," the P5+1 group could get "a great extension of the time needed for Iran to stage a nuclear breakout. But it won’t be able to get guarantees that there will be no breakout." Iran says its nuclear program is solely for peaceful purposes.
The United States and its allies do not believe this claim and have slapped economic sanctions on Iran that experts say are seriously hurting the country’s economy. "Oil exports from Iran have been cut roughly from 2.5 million to 1 million barrels a day," said Allen Keiswetter of Washington’s Middle East Institute. "Furthermore, the price of oil has now dropped by about 50 percent. So, you are looking at Iran receiving 20 to 25 percent of the revenues that it did previously."
Tehran's uranium enrichment capacity and the speed at which economic sanctions should be lifted are reported to be the major outstanding differences between the two sides. Iran may be trying to use the negotiations to ease the economic sanctions without giving up much of its nuclear capability, according to Phillips.
"Iran wants to wriggle out of sanctions without foreclosing its nuclear options," he said. "That is, it wants to weaken sanctions as much as possible but it doesn’t want to definitively give up its nuclear option. And unfortunately, that won’t work for the U.S."
