The government Biden restored a sanctions waiver that will allow countries to cooperate with the Will into civilian nuclear projects, two senior US officials said on Friday, a move that comes as US officials warn that there are only weeks left to salvage the 2015 Iran nuclear deal.
A senior State Department official said the resignation “is not a concession to Iran” nor is it “a sign that we are on the verge of reaching an understanding on a mutual return to full implementation of the” Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). ), the formal name of the nuclear deal.
However, the move comes when the authorities involved in the ongoing negotiations in Vienna, Austria, which are trying to salvage the deal – which the United States abandoned in 2018 and which Iran has increasingly flouted – have reached a stage that requires “political decisions” to be completed quickly. The last round of negotiations has been postponed since January 28.
“We are issuing the exemption now for one simple reason: it will allow some of our international partners to have more detailed technical discussions to enable cooperation that we consider to be in our non-proliferation interests. [nuclear]” said the official.
The official added that “the technical discussions facilitated by the exemption are necessary in the final weeks of the JCPOA negotiations, and the reduction itself would be essential to ensure Iran’s speedy compliance with its nuclear commitments.”
“If the negotiations do not result in a return to the nuclear deal, these technical discussions could still contribute to achieving our non-proliferation goals,” they said.
A congressional aide told the CNN that congressmen were not notified of the restoration of the exemption.
The exemptions will allow companies and countries to continue working on civilian nuclear projects at Iran’s Bushehr nuclear plant, the Arak heavy water plant and the research reactor in Tehran, the capital of Iran.
The government Trump issued a sanctions waiver for that work under the 2015 deal even after withdrawing from the deal in 2018, saying it helped “preserve oversight of Iran’s civilian nuclear program” and “reduce proliferation risks”.
However, in May 2020, then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced that the United States would terminate the sanctions exemption. A senior State Department official described the restoration of the exemption, which was first reported by the AP, as a return to the “status quo”.
Iran has increasingly strayed from its commitments under the deal, and US officials have warned that it has just weeks to return to the deal, given Iran’s rapid nuclear developments. Tehran has called for broad sanctions relief before returning to fulfill the agreement.
A senior government official said Iran did not ask for the exemption to be restored and claimed it did not see it as a relief.
“The only way for Iran to obtain ‘sanctions relief’ under the waiver is to implement the projects, which would be an unequivocal victory for us as it would be the partial re-implementation of the JCPOA,” the administration official said.
Behnam Ben Taleblu of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) told CNN that “issuing exemptions to allow for civilian nuclear cooperation with Iran at a time when Iran is violating the JCPOA is a strategic mistake.”
He also noted that “the news of the resignation is the clearest sign yet that a resurrected deal with Iran may be on the way.”
Source: CNN Brasil
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