Iran’s red line on enrichment
Forget France and Israel; talks are probably stuck on Iran’s insistence on its right to enrich uranium on its own soil.
Why did the Nov. 7-9 negotiations between Iran and the five permanent members of the UN Security Council and Germany (the so-called P5+1) on Iran’s disputed nuclear program falter, despite high hopes for an agreement?
The standard explanation by many journalists and pundits is that the French scuttled it and that they did so at Israel’s behest. Based on this somewhat misleading interpretation, no one but the expressive French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius and combative Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are to be blamed.
This is, in any case, yesterday’s news, as US Secretary of State John Kerry has made clear that there is now a unified P5+1 proposal before Iran.
Without discounting the Israeli-French influence, and the divisions among the P5+1 before reaching agreement, I offer the following alternative explanation that better fits what Kerry, British Foreign Secretary William Hague, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, The New York Times and a few other credible sources have said and reported.
