Grossi says diplomatic efforts to revive the JCPOA, ‘is not at its best point,’ but progress is ‘not impossible’
The director general of the UN nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Rafael Grossi, affirmed on 7 February the urgency of resuming nuclear negotiations with Iran, while further warning that if talks continue to stall or fail, there will be consequences.
The diplomatic effort to revive the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) “is not at its best point,” but progress is “not impossible,” Grossi said during a discussion at the London-based Chatham House think tank.
He added that he hopes to restore the JCPOA; otherwise, the situation will worsen, potentially exacerbating the political turmoil in the West Asian region.
Iran and the remaining parties to the JCPOA – Russia, China, France, Britain, and Germany – have held several negotiations in Vienna since April 2021 to restore the agreement, resulting in little success and constant postponements due to disagreements between Washington and Tehran. This occurred three years after former US president Donald Trump withdrew from the nuclear deal to impose stricter economic sanctions on Iran.
Last month, Iran’s Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian disclosed that Qatar is currently relaying messages between Tehran and the other parties to the 2015 nuclear deal in a bid to resume talks.
On 14 January, the former Qatari Prime Minister Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim Al-Thani (HbJ) warned that the “Gulf region has become fraught with dangers” due to the delay in reviving the Iran nuclear deal and Israel’s insistence on acquiring weapons that will allow it to attack the Islamic Republic.
“I hope that we, in the Gulf region, will explain to the US and the west, through all possible channels, the danger of any military escalation and the need to deal with the existing problems peacefully, because we will be the first to lose,” HbJ added.
Experts suggest that Israeli pressure on Washington coupled with demands from Iran for the UN nuclear watchdog to end relentless probes of its atomic sites have caused the talks to falter.