Latest news with #JCPOA
Euronews
2 hours ago
- Politics
- Euronews
Why do Europeans still believe a nuclear deal with Iran is possible?
Europe hopes to use diplomacy to avoid the threat of all-out war in the Middle East, amid fears that the conflict between Israel and Iran could engulf the wider region. On Friday, the foreign ministers of France, Germany and the United Kingdom, together with the EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas, will hold talks with representatives of the Tehran regime in Geneva. The meeting aims to de-escalate the fighting between the two Middle Eastern powers, which began when Israel launched airstrikes against Iran and killed some of its top military commanders last Friday. The Europeans seek to initiate a form of shuttle diplomacy between Israel, Iran, Washington and the main European capitals. They would like to reestablish a security dialogue with Tehran, similar to the one interrupted in 2018 when the first Trump administration unilaterally withdrew from the Iranian nuclear deal, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). The JCPA, which was signed by Iran along with China, the EU, France, Germany, Russia and the UK in 2015, stipulated an easing of Western sanctions against the Middle Eastern country in exchange for Tehran's commitment to a drastic reduction of Uranium stockpiles and centrifuges at its nuclear facilities. Such sites are now being targeted by Israeli missile attacks, including those at Natanz and Isfahan. In 2018, despite the UN nuclear agency saying that Tehran was progressively adopting the restrictions required by the agreement, Trump's administration withdrew from the JCPOA, effectively rendering it null and void. By walking back on the JCPOA, the US put an end to one of the main achievements of European foreign policy. David Rigoulet-Roze, an author and associate research fellow at IRIS, a French foreign policy institute, said the cancellation of the Iranian nuclear deal of 2015 was a hasty act. "The agreement had the merit, despite all its imperfections, of existing, of serving as a basis, including for the possible subsequent renegotiation of something more binding', said Rigoulet-Roze. 'Even though, the Europeans were not in control of the process'. The accord represented an opportunity for the EU to reopen trade relations with Iran after decades of US and Western sanctions against the Islamic Republic. However, after the JCPOA's demise, the regime in Tehran stigmatised the EU for the failure of the agreement. 'Somewhat wrongly, because we obviously didn't provoke the cancellation of the accord and we have also suffered the consequences of what is known as the extraterritoriality of American law', Rigoulet-Roze said. He noted the capacity of the US to impose sanctions on a global scale, particularly secondary sanctions, 'which are formidable and which have obviously curbed Europe's desire to develop trade relations that were authorised after 2015'. Iran has been a party to the nuclear non-proliferation treaty since the time of Shah Reza Pahlavi, who was the original founder of Iran's nuclear programme. Therefore, Tehran has been obliged to open up its sites for inspection by UN agencies. This motivated Brussels to treat Iran as a potentially rational actor despite its puzzling decisions and smoke and mirrors regarding its nuclear programme. Years ago, Tehran ended its highly enriched uranium production, yet it continued developing its military conventional ballistic capabilities and financing Middle Eastern proxies, including Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen. "This was a kind of matter of national pride as far as the Iranians were concerned. So I don't think that they, and this is in retrospect, ever planned to negotiate it away,' senior British diplomat and adviser Robert Cooper told Euronews. A strategic nuclear force, Cooper explained, "was going to mark them out as one of the most important powers in the Middle East. And as an international power beyond the Middle East as well." The Iranian nuclear programme and the existence of uranium enrichment equipment and heavy water facilities were officially made public by then-president Mohammad Khatami, a reformist who persuaded France, Germany and the UK to reach a deal that was meant to oblige Tehran to stop the uranium enrichment. Javier Solana, the EU foreign and security policy chief at the time, attended the negotiations in Tehran. The Spanish diplomat was one of the deal's key architects, who believed that a deal is better than any conflict, and that the EU is best poised to broker it. "Solana was fascinated by Iran, and you know, we had a certain admiration for it. Our aim at the time was to persuade the Iranians that a military nuclear programme would make them a target,' Cooper recalled.
NDTV
3 hours ago
- Politics
- NDTV
Satellite Images Show Massive Damage To Iran's Arak Nuclear Facility
New Delhi: Satellite pictures from Maxar Technologies, dated June 19, confirm that Israel's recent airstrike caused substantial structural damage to Iran's heavy water reactor facility at Arak, also known as Khondab, roughly 250 kilometres southwest of Tehran. The high-resolution images reveal the collapse of the upper section of the reactor dome alongside visible destruction to adjacent infrastructure, including distillation towers. While Iranian authorities acknowledged that "projectiles" had struck the compound, they did not initially disclose the extent of the destruction. The satellite images provide the most detailed visual confirmation of the Israeli strike's impact. Facility Designed For Plutonium Production Though not operational at the time of the strike, the Arak facility has remained under close observation by nuclear experts due to its technical capacity to produce plutonium, a material that, like highly enriched uranium, can be used to construct a nuclear weapon. Iran has long maintained that its nuclear programme is for peaceful purposes. Arak was originally conceived in the 1990s following Iran's decision to pursue a nuclear capability in response to the 1980-88 war with Iraq. Unable to procure a heavy water reactor from international sources, Tehran opted to develop its own. According to the Associated Press, heavy water reactors differ from light water reactors in that they use deuterium oxide (heavy water) as a neutron moderator, enabling the use of natural uranium and the production of plutonium as a byproduct. The Israeli Strikes Over the past week, Israel has acknowledged strikes on Natanz, Isfahan, Karaj, and Tehran, describing the campaign as a preemptive measure to degrade Iran's nuclear capabilities and prevent any progress toward weaponisation. Video footage released by the Israel Defense Forces shows precision-guided munitions hitting the reactor dome, followed by a plume of fire and debris. The footage, though brief, was consistent with Maxar's satellite imagery showing the collapse of the reactor dome's crown structure. In a statement, Israeli officials said the attack was "intended to target the plutonium-producing component of the Khondab reactor in order to prevent its restoration and eventual use for military nuclear development." The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the UN's nuclear watchdog, has confirmed that there was no radiological release from the Arak facility, noting that the reactor was not yet loaded with fuel and had never entered operational status. Nevertheless, the agency expressed "serious concern" over the precedent of military attacks on nuclear installations. Arak's Role In 2015 Nuclear Deal The Arak reactor was a contentious point during the negotiations of the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the nuclear deal between Iran and six world powers. As part of that agreement, Iran pledged to redesign the reactor to significantly reduce its plutonium output and render part of the core inoperable by pouring concrete into it. Yet, following the US withdrawal from the agreement in 2018 under US President Donald Trump, progress on the redesign halted. In 2019, Ali Akbar Salehi, the head of Iran's Atomic Energy Organisation at the time, revealed on Iranian state television that duplicate parts had been secretly procured to allow for the potential reassembly of the disabled components. Inspectors from the IAEA have repeatedly said since then that due to limitations imposed by Iranian authorities, the agency lost "continuity of knowledge" regarding both the reactor's configuration and heavy water stockpiles.
Hindustan Times
4 hours ago
- Politics
- Hindustan Times
In Trumpworld, toppling rulers is taboo
BY THE TIME the Iran crisis ends, President Donald Trump risks breaking some solemn promises about war and peace. Large-scale American help to destroy Iran's deeply buried nuclear sites would imperil his pledge to keep America out of Middle Eastern conflicts. Yet if his caution allows a wounded Iran to successfully sprint for a bomb, that would challenge Mr Trump's stated belief that 'you can't have peace if Iran has a nuclear weapon'. With so much at stake, it is tempting to dismiss one more area in which Mr Trump's reputation is at stake, namely, his vaunted prowess as a negotiator. Even as Iran and Israel exchange salvoes of missiles, Mr Trump keeps urging Iran's leaders to resume talks and cut a deal 'before there is nothing left'. That puts him at odds with Israel's prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, who is openly rooting for the overthrow of the Islamic regime. In a televised address to the Iranian public, Mr Netanyahu declared that Israel's attacks are 'clearing the path for you to achieve your freedom'. More on the war between Israel and Iran: Yet Mr Trump is serious about getting Iran's leaders back to the negotiating table, say officials and diplomats who have watched him up close. He has a deep aversion to regime change. Days after his first victory in 2016 he announced a Middle Eastern policy focused narrowly on fighting terrorists, saying: 'We will stop racing to topple foreign regimes that we know nothing about.' According to Reuters, a news agency, Mr Trump recently vetoed an Israeli plan to kill Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, declaring political leaders off-limits unless Iran attacks American targets. That reflects a horror of creating power vacuums in dangerous places, rather than any love for hardline clerics. Mr Trump is a man with complicated views of war. He sees conflict as wasteful and often irrational, destroying lives and property. But he is willing to kill foreigners who threaten America, as when he sent drones to assassinate Iran's most important general, Qassem Suleimani, in Baghdad in January 2020. In the words of an insider: 'Trump hates war, but he's not afraid of it.' A distaste for regime change sets Mr Trump apart from traditional conservative hawks. John Bolton was Mr Trump's national security adviser in 2018-19. Now a critic, he admits that he and his former boss did not agree on the likely endgame when in 2018 Mr Trump pulled out of the JCPOA, a multinational agreement to curb Iran's nuclear ambitions brokered by his predecessor, Barack Obama. Nor, Mr Bolton says, was Mr Trump bent on breaking the regime in Tehran when he replaced the JCPOA with a 'maximum pressure' campaign of harsh economic sanctions. 'I certainly thought that getting out of the JCPOA and maximum pressure were all logical steps towards the only strategy that can bring lasting peace in the Middle East, which is the overthrow of the ayatollahs in Iran,' Mr Bolton reports. 'He never got to that logical step.' In time, Mr Trump fired Mr Bolton. Explaining that dismissal, Mr Trump grumbled that Mr Bolton had asked North Korea to surrender its entire nuclear-weapons programme before receiving American concessions. Specifically, Mr Trump said it was 'a disaster' that Mr Bolton had publicly called this the 'Libyan model'. North Korea reacted badly, possibly because after Libya's unilateral disarmament a NATO-led coalition bombed the country, leading to the toppling and killing of its dictator, Muammar Qaddafi. In his first term, the closest that Mr Trump came to endorsing regime change was when he declared an opposition leader in Venezuela, Juan Guaidó, to be the country's legitimate president. He hinted that America might use force against Venezuela's thuggish left-wing ruler, Nicolás Maduro. In part, Mr Trump was trying to please anti-communist voters in Florida, suggests Mr Bolton. He concedes that his boss later lost confidence in Mr Guaidó, believing that he had been led to back 'the wrong horse'. There are two pillars to Mr Trump's dislike of regime change, suggests Elliott Abrams, a veteran of several Republican administrations who served as special envoy to Venezuela and Iran during the first Trump presidency. First, Mr Trump is responding to policy failures in Afghanistan and Iraq. Second, Mr Abrams believes that Mr Trump is influenced by Henry Kissinger and other cold-war practitioners of realpolitik. According to that school of statecraft: 'All of these countries, Iran, Russia, China, North Korea, are black boxes and they have a person at the top, and you must negotiate with that person.' Mr Abrams calls this a 'club of leaders' view, which attaches little significance to ordinary citizens' wishes. In this worldview: 'We deal with people who've risen to the top of the greasy pole, no matter how they got there: by winning elections, by murdering people. It doesn't matter.' Jaw-jaw, with added arm-twisting In Mr Trump's first term some European allies mistook maximum-pressure sanctions on Iran as a 'stalking horse for regime change', says Brian Hook, America's Iran special envoy in 2018-20. They were mistaken: Mr Trump sincerely prefers dealmaking to conflict, he says. Mr Hook thinks that allies also underestimated the power of unilateral American sanctions to gravely weaken Iran's economy and its overseas armed proxies. If Mr Trump had secured a consecutive second term in 2020, 'the Iranians would eventually have had no choice but to call him and cut a deal', he argues. Allies still struggle to understand Mr Trump. In places such as Europe, modern-day diplomacy is seen as a multilateral endeavour, needed to check aggression by rogue bullies. But Trumpian diplomacy is an expression of raw American power. Mr Trump could be a silk-coated potentate at the Congress of Vienna in 1814, carving up the world with fellow rulers, guided by the interests of great powers and a horror of disorder. Dealmaking may not save Iran's leaders, for events are moving fast. But if the regime falls, cheers in Mr Trump's White House will be tinged with alarm. Subscribers to The Economist can sign up to our Opinion newsletter, which brings together the best of our leaders, columns, guest essays and reader correspondence. Get 360° coverage—from daily headlines to 100 year archives.
Euronews
5 hours ago
- Politics
- Euronews
EU to influence Iran nuclear talks from sidelines in Geneva
The foreign ministers of France, Germany, and the United Kingdom - collectively known as the E3 - will meet with Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi in Geneva to discuss Iran's nuclear program in Geneva on Friday. While the EU has historically played a key role in negotiations with Iran, it seems unlikely to participate in the formal talks. When asked by Euronews whether EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas would participate in the talks, a European Commission spokesperson gave no clear confirmation. 'We have always expressed our openness to dialogue and negotiation. When such dialogue occurs, we will inform you,' the spokesperson said, leaving open the possibility of a last-minute invitation. Before the E3-Iran meeting, the European ministers are expected to meet with Kallas at Germany's permanent mission in Geneva however – a move that highlights the EU's continued efforts to coordinate and facilitate diplomacy, even if indirectly. Brussels has long played a central role in the Iran nuclear negotiations, particularly through the High Representative for Foreign Affairs in the broader EU+3 format – which once included other countries such as the United States, Russia and China. Under the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the UN-brokered nuclear agreement aimed at lifting sanctions in exchange for Iran's compliance with nuclear obligations, the EU served as a key facilitator and guardian of the agreement's implementation. Under the previous administration of US President Donald Trump, Washington pulled out of the JCPOA. The upcoming talks are expected to revive dialogue in light of the escalating conflict and persuade Iran to provide credible guarantees that its nuclear program remains exclusively civilian in nature. However, the influence of the European parties has waned in recent months. The last E3-Iran meeting was held in January, shortly before Trump assumed office. Subsequent indirect US-Iran talks, brokered by Oman, failed to yield results, with the sixth planned round cancelled after the Israeli military strikes on Iran. Although not directly involved this time, the EU has played a behind-the-scenes role as a diplomatic facilitator, attempting to bridge divides among European countries and even between Europe and the US. The EU's presence in the talks has visibly diminished since the tenure of former High Representative Federica Mogherini, who was a prominent architect and staunch defender of the 2015 deal. Despite its limited visibility, the EU hopes that its coordinating efforts can still shape the outcome of the talks or at least keep the door open for renewed multilateral diplomacy on Iran's nuclear file.
Saudi Gazette
5 hours ago
- Politics
- Saudi Gazette
Europe partly to blame for Iran-Israel conflict, Iran's UN ambassador says
GENEVA — Iran's ambassador and permanent representative to the United Nations in Geneva has said diplomacy still have a chance if Israel stops its strikes but warned that Iran would target the United States if it chooses to come into the conflict. "We believe that the minimum thing Europeans can do is to very explicitly condemn Israel and stop their support for Israel," Ali Bahraini said in an interview for Euronews. Bahraini said Europe's reluctance to condemn Israel's aggression and its inability to keep the nuclear deal (JCPOA) afloat have all contributed to the current intensifying hostilities between Iran and Israel, now in their seventh day. "The impunity which has been given to Israel is something which encourages that entity to continue committing new crimes. And this impunity is because of inaction by Europeans. By the United States and the Security Council," Bahraini explained. "We request and we ask Europe to push Israel to stop the aggression. Europe should play its responsibility to put an end to the impunity that Israel is enjoying. Europe should stop helping or assisting Israel financially, militarily, or by intelligence. And Europe should play a strong role in explaining for the United States and for Israel that Iranian nuclear technology is not something which they can destroy." Bahraini said that what he called Europe's "failures" would be presented to the foreign ministers of France, Germany and the United Kingdom – known collectively as the E3 – at talks in Geneva on are meeting in Switzerland to discuss Iran's nuclear program, which is at the heart of the current conflict with was previously subject to an international nuclear deal known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), which saw the country receive sanctions relief in exchange for strict limits on its nuclear his first term in office, President Donald Trump withdrew the US from the pact in 2018, slamming it as "the worst deal ever negotiated" and slapping new sanctions on then, the other signatories to the deal have scrambled to keep Iran in compliance, but Tehran considers the deal void and has continued with uranium enrichment, which at current levels sits at 60%.That's still technically below the weapons-grade levels of 90%, but still far above the 3.67% permitted under the maintains that its nuclear program is peaceful and purely for civilian purposes. Israel, on the other hand, says Tehran is working towards the construction of a nuclear weapon, which could be used against told Euronews that there is still a window for diplomacy to reach a new nuclear deal, but first, the fighting with Israel has to stop."For our people and for our country, now the first priority is to stop aggression, to stop attacks," he told Euronews."I personally cannot imagine there would be a strong probability at the moment for a kind of diplomatic idea or initiative because for us it would be inappropriate if we think or talk at the moment about anything rather than stopping the aggressors," Bahraini pointed to the daily exchanges of missile and drone strikes that have taken place since last Friday, the conflict has also led to an escalating war of words, particularly between Trump and some senior figures in asked by reporters on Wednesday whether he intended to bring the US military into the conflict to strike Iran alongside Israel, Trump said, "I may do it, I may not do it. Nobody knows what I'm going to do."While Trump appeared to avoid a direct commitment to military action, Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu interpreted his comments as a show of support and, in a television address later on Wednesday evening, thanked Trump for "standing by us".Into that mix came Iran's mission to the United Nations, which said no officials from the country would "grovel at the gates of the White House" to reach a nuclear deal with the United said it was clear to him that "the United States has been complicit to what Israel is doing now."He said Iran would respond very firmly if the United States "crosses the red lines" and said that strikes on the country had not been ruled out."Our military forces are monitoring the situation. It is their domain to decide how to react," he said."What can I tell you for sure is that our military forces have a strong dominance on the situation, they have a very precise assessment and calculation about the movements of the United States. And they know where the United States should be attacked," Bahraini also said that Iran has not requested any international support and is protecting itself funds a string of militant groups around the region, including Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the Houthis in Yemen, and while they all have different aims and objectives, often the ideology that binds them is their anti-Israel fighting with Israel broke out last week, there were concerns that Iran might demand these groups step up and fight alongside it, in return for the funding and training they have received from far, that has not happened."At this stage, we are confident that we can defeat Israel independently and we can stop aggression without needing any request of help by anybody," Bahraini explained."I personally believe that Israel is not an entity with which somebody can negotiate. The thing we have to do is to stop aggression, and we have to show Israel that it is not able to cross the red lines against Iran.""Israel is accustomed to committing crimes, and we think that we have to stop it somewhere. We have to tell Israel that there is a red line," he concluded. — Euronews
