West tells Iran time running out on nuke talks

VIENNA/DUBAI • Western officials have warned Teheran that negotiations to revive its nuclear deal cannot continue indefinitely, after the sides announced a break following the election of a new hardline president in Iran.

Negotiations have been ongoing in Vienna since April to work out how Iran and the United States can both return to compliance with the nuclear pact, which Washington abandoned in 2018 under then President Donald Trump, and Iran subsequently violated.

Sunday's pause in the talks came after Mr Ebrahim Raisi, a hardliner and fierce critic of the West, won Iran's presidential election last Friday. Two diplomats said they expected a break of around 10 days.

Mr Raisi will take office in early August, replacing pragmatist Hassan Rouhani, under whom Teheran struck the deal agreeing to curbs to its nuclear programme in return for the lifting of international sanctions.

Iranian and Western officials alike say Mr Raisi's rise is unlikely to alter Iran's negotiating position: Iran's hardline Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei already has final say on all major policy.

Still, some Iranian officials have suggested that Teheran could have an interest in pushing through a deal before the new president takes office, to give Mr Raisi a clean slate.

An Iranian government official said that if a deal is finalised before Mr Raisi takes office, the new president will be able to deflect blame for any concessions onto his predecessor.

Britain, France and Germany have been acting as mediators, shuttling between the Iranian delegation and a US team that - Washington having quit the pact - is not a formal participant. The Western countries say the longer Iran violates the deal and produces banned nuclear material, the harder it becomes to restore the pact.

"Time is on nobody's side. These talks cannot be open-ended," the diplomats said, adding that the most difficult issues still need to be resolved.

US national security adviser Jake Sullivan echoed those comments, telling broadcaster ABC News that there was still "a fair distance" to go, including on sanctions and nuclear commitments that Iran has to make.

With the talks on pause, attention will now turn to extending a separate accord between Iran and the United Nations nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which expires on Thursday. Iran has ended extra monitoring measures that were introduced under the 2015 deal.

European Union political director Enrique Mora, who is coordinating the nuclear talks, expects an extension that would let data continue to be collected while placing limits on the IAEA's access to it for now.

While the rise of a hardliner to succeed Mr Rouhani was expected, it could play into the hands of the deal's opponents on the right in the US, and in Israel and Arab countries, who say Iran is not reforming and not trustworthy.

On Sunday, Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett said a Raisi government would be a "regime of brutal hangmen" with which world powers should not negotiate a new nuclear accord.

Mr Raisi is under US sanctions over a past that includes what the US and human rights groups say was the extrajudicial killing of thousands of political prisoners in 1988.

Like Mr Khamenei, Mr Raisi has supported the nuclear talks as a route to cancelling US sanctions that have wrecked Iran's economy.

"Who Raisi picks as his foreign minister will reveal the new government's foreign policy approach," said one official, while reiterating that nuclear policy was decided by Mr Khamenei.

REUTERS