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Iranian Minister of Foreign Affairs Abbas Araghchi has said that “good progress” has been made in indirect nuclear talks with the United States, as Washington warned that military action remains an option if diplomacy fails.
The talks, mediated by Oman, were held in the Swiss city of Geneva on Tuesday against a backdrop of increased military flexing by both sides in the Gulf region.
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“Ultimately, we were able to reach broad agreement on a set of guiding principles, based on which we will move forward and begin working on the text of a potential agreement,” Araghchi told state television after the talks.
“Good progress” has been made, compared with the previous round in Oman earlier this month, he said, adding, “We now have a clear path ahead, which I think is positive.”
He acknowledged that it “will take time to narrow” the gap between the countries, and said that once both sides come up with draft texts for an agreement, “the drafts would be exchanged and a date for a third round [of talks] would be set”.
In Washington, DC, US Vice President JD Vance also appeared to indicate that his country preferred diplomacy, but painted a more mixed picture.
“In some ways, it went well; they agreed to meet afterwards,” Vance said in a Fox News interview.
“But in other ways, it was very clear that the president has set some red lines that the Iranians are not yet willing to actually acknowledge and work through,” Vance told The Story with Martha MacCallum programme.
“We’re going to keep on working it. But of course, the president reserves the ability to say when he thinks that diplomacy has reached its natural end,” Vance said.
Stumbling blocks
Iran has for years sought relief from sweeping sanctions imposed by the US, including a Washington-imposed ban on other countries buying its oil.
Tehran has said it wants the ongoing talks to focus on its uranium enrichment programme, insisting that any deal must deliver tangible economic benefit to Iran while maintaining its sovereignty and national security.
Washington has demanded that Iran forgo uranium enrichment on its soil, and has sought to expand the scope of talks to non-nuclear issues, such as Tehran’s missile stockpile.
Iran has said it will not accept zero uranium enrichment and that its missile capabilities are off the table.
The talks come amid high tensions in the Gulf, with the US deploying two aircraft carriers to the region. The first – the USS Abraham Lincoln, with nearly 80 aircraft – was positioned about 700km (435 miles) from the Iranian coast as of Sunday, satellite images showed.
Its location puts at least a dozen US F‑35s and F‑18 fighter jets within striking distance. A second carrier was dispatched over the weekend.
Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei warned on Tuesday that the country had the ability to sink a US warship. “A warship is certainly a dangerous weapon, but even more dangerous is the weapon capable of sinking it,” he said.
Iran has also sought to display its military might, with its Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) beginning a series of war games on Monday in the Strait of Hormuz to prepare for “potential security and military threats”.
Just as the talks began in Geneva, Iranian state media said Iran was temporarily shutting parts of the Strait of Hormuz due to “security precautions” while the IRGC conducted military drills there.
Iran has repeatedly threatened to close the waterway, which is a vital oil export route from Gulf Arab states, in retaliation for any attack. The move would choke a fifth of global oil flows and send crude prices sharply higher.
Tehran has also threatened to strike US military bases in the region in the event of an attack.
A previous attempt at diplomacy collapsed last year when Israel launched surprise strikes on Iran in June, beginning a 12-day war that Washington briefly joined to bomb three nuclear sites at Natanz, Fordow and Isfahan.
‘Degraded’
Ali Vaez, the Crisis Group’s Iran project director, told Al Jazeera he believed there is a lot of space for agreement on the nuclear front, “simply because Iran’s nuclear programme has been degraded on the ground, and so, some of the cost of the compromise has already sunk in”.
“It should be easier for the Iranians to accept zero enrichment for a period of time, because they have not spun a single centrifuge since the 12-day war back in June,” he said.
“But when it gets to non-nuclear questions, like regional activities or their missile programme, I think, at best, the Iranians will be willing to do superficial concessions, not the kind of grand bargain capitulation that the US expect,” he said.
Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian, meanwhile, reiterated in an interview published on Tuesday that Tehran was “absolutely not seeking nuclear weapons”.
“If anyone wants to verify this, we are open to such verification to take place,” he said.
“However, we do not accept that we should be prevented from using nuclear science and knowledge to address our illnesses and to advance our industry and agriculture,” he added.
Iran has joined the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which guarantees countries the right to pursue civilian nuclear power in return for requiring them to forgo atomic weapons and cooperate with the UN nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency.
Israel, which has not signed the treaty, neither confirms nor denies having nuclear weapons, under a decades-old ambiguity policy designed to deter surrounding enemies. Scholars believe it does.
