The U.S. and other world powers meeting with Iran in Istanbul this week will press Tehran to take concrete steps to ensure that its nuclear activities are peaceful and to justify continuation of an eight-year diplomatic track that has so far yielded few gains, said American and European officials involved in the negotiations.
The U.S. and other world powers meeting with Iran in Istanbul this week
will press Tehran to take concrete steps to ensure that its nuclear activities
are peaceful and to justify continuation of an eight-year diplomatic track that
has so far yielded few gains, said American and European officials involved in
the negotiations.
Washington and its European allies specifically want to discuss with
Iran
reworking a year-old proposal that would see President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's
government ship out a substantial portion of
Tehran
's
stockpile of low-enriched uranium in return for Western energy assistance,
according to these officials.
Western diplomats see such a deal as limiting
Iran
's
ability to quickly "break-out" and produce the weapons-grade fuel
required to develop an atomic bomb.
Tehran
maintains that its nuclear program is strictly for peaceful purposes.
Representatives from the five permanent United Nations Security Council
members, plus Germany, are also seeking to explore with Tehran during talks
Friday and Saturday new ways to allow U.N. inspectors greater access to Iran's
expanding nuclear infrastructure.
The U.N.'s nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, has voiced
growing concerns in recent months that Tehran is constricting its site visits
and access to documentation.
"Prospects for exploring a fuel swap will depend on whether Iranians are
ready to get serious," said a senior
U.S.
official involved in the talks. "Remember, this is meant as a
confidence-building measure to begin to demonstrate that their nuclear program
is for peaceful purposes."
This week's talks follow negotiations between
Tehran
and
the world powers held in
Geneva
last
month that registered few gains, except for the agreement to hold a second
round. But the
U.S.
and
its allies are coming to
Turkey
voicing increasing confidence that economic sanctions imposed against
Iran
, as
well as other overt and covert actions, are slowing
Tehran
's
nuclear work.
Israeli officials stunned the international community this month by announcing
that they didn't believe
Tehran
could
build an atomic weapon until 2015. Some senior officials in the Jewish state
had initially proclaimed that an Iranian bomb would be ready within months.
Many Western officials credit a computer worm, known as Stuxnet, with attacking
Iran
's
nuclear-enrichment facility at Natanz and making inoperable thousands of the
facility's centrifuges. Neither the
U.S.
nor
Israel
has
either confirmed or denied a role in the cyber attack.
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told Arab governments last week that
Washington
believed
Tehran
's
nuclear program was facing mounting "technical" problems. And this
dynamic, said
U.S.
and
European officials, is giving international diplomacy aimed at ending
Iran
's
nuclear program more time.
"We've been going through vapid talks with the Iranians for a long time. But
now, we have real sanctions and a real strategy in place," said a senior
European official. "
Tehran
won't
find that more vapid meetings in
Istanbul
will
allow for any alleviation of the growing economic pressure on them."
Iran
,
however, is coming to
Turkey
offering no signs that it is willing to respect U.N. Security Council
resolutions and suspend its production of nuclear fuel.
Tehran
is
also viewed as having secured a diplomatic victory just by getting the
international community to accept
Istanbul
as
the venue for the talks.
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has evolved into an important
diplomatic friend to
Tehran
in
recent years.
Turkey
and
Brazil
were
the only two countries on the 15-nation U.N. Security Council that voted last
year against a fourth round of economic sanctions being imposed against
Iran
. And
Erdogan's diplomatic team initiated its own attempt to secure an
energy-assistance package for
Tehran
,
though the
U.S.
eventually killed the deal after viewing it as too generous.
Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu is hosting a welcome dinner for the
participants in the talks Thursday evening.
Turkey
said
Davutoglu won't sit in on any of the formal talks, but many European officials
said they expected
Turkey
's top
diplomat to exert some influence from behind the scenes and to confer with
Tehran
's
delegation.
Iran
is
also coming to
Istanbul
in a
strengthened position regionally.
Tehran
's close ally, the militant Lebanese political
party Hezbollah, successfully overthrew
Beirut
's
pro-Western government last week over a dispute tied to a U.N. investigation
into the murder of the country's former prime minister, Rafik Hariri. Efforts
by
Washington
's
allies in
Saudi Arabia
and
France
to
mediate the crisis have fizzled.
Iran
's
diplomatic allies,
Turkey
,
Qatar
and
Syria
, are
increasingly filling the diplomatic space.
Iran
has
also seen its political allies in
Iraq
and
Afghanistan
strengthened. And
Tehran
's
diplomatic team is expected to use the talks in
Turkey
to
try to talk as much about these regional issues as
Iran
's own
nuclear work.
"We will never negotiate [away] our right to develop nuclear power for
peaceful purposes,"
Iran
's
ambassador to the U.N., Mohammad Khazaee, told reporters in
New
York
this week. He also denied that the Stuxnet virus
or economic sanctions had succeeded in damaging
Iran
's
nuclear-fuel program. But he stressed that
Tehran
was
eager to find ways to help American forces stabilize
Afghanistan
, as a
prelude to them leaving the Central Asian country.
Iranian officials have also said they were hoping to use the talks to discuss a
number of other broader security issues, including counter-narcotics, energy
collaboration, and maritime security.
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