After months of negotiations over Tehran’s nuclear program, Iran and the group — the U.N. Security Council’s five permanent members, plus Germany — were unable to come up with an agreement by a midnight Thursday deadline.The deal centers on Iran shelving its nuclear program in exchange for sanctions relief. Because a deal was not reached by midnight, Congress now has 60 days to review any potential deal before U.S. sanctions can be lifted. Previously, it had been 30 days. Secretary of State John Kerry said earlier in the day that the U.S. was not going to rush a deal, and would leave if a proper agreement was not achieved. Meanwhile Iran has blamed bickering between the U.S. and its negotiating partners for the missing deadlilne.Late Thursday night a senior Iranian official said the U.S. and other nations involved in the talks had changed their positions, backtracking from earlier agreements and bickering amongst themselves over how and when to lift certain sanctions against Tehran. The good news is that the talks are continuing even after the deadline has expired. But the not-so-good news is that the negotiations seemed to have hit a complicated roadblock with US Secretary of State John Kerry warning that the US could walk away from talks if “tough decisions don’t get made”. The Iranians have accused the US of reversing positions and upending agreements. One senior Iranian official lamented that Iran now feels it is in five bilateral negotiations since every country has different “red lines”. While the US and Iran seem to be blaming each other for dragging the negotiations, the rest of the negotiators belonging to P5+1 (the UK, France, Russia and China plus Germany) seemed reasonably hopeful of finalising a deal in due course. The French Foreign Minister, Laurent Fabius, said that “the last hundred metres of a marathon are the hardest. There are difficult points that remain, but things are all the same going in the right direction.” Iran and the world powers agreed an interim deal in 2013, which saw the former gain around $7 billion in sanctions relief, in return for curbing uranium enrichment and giving UN inspectors better access to its facilities. World powers also committed to facilitating Iran’s access to $4.2 billion in restricted funds. Several rounds of sanctions in recent years have targeted Iran’s key energy and financial sectors, crippling its economy.A deal between Iran and P5+1 would not only bring Iran out of its isolation and economic privation, it could also help assuage the Arab world’s nuclear fears and its suspicions regarding Iran’s regional ambitions could be put to permanent rest, hopefully. And at the same time, many countries in the region as well as the world would benefit immensely from Iran’s return to world markets.
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