Officials From Iran, World Powers Reconvene in Vienna for Nuclear Negotiations

Representatives of Iran and the world powers again gathered in Vienna on Thursday to resume the current round of negotiations aimed at re-upping the Iran nuclear agreement originally signed in 2015, under which Iran agreed to slow its nuclear production in exchange for an end to most sanctions. The seventh round of negotiations opened last week, after a several-month hiatus during which Iran elected a new hard-line president, and paused on Friday allowing the negotiators from Iran, Britain, France, Germany, Russia and China time to confer with their governments over the progress, or lack of progress, of the current talks.  The United States, which unilaterally left the agreement in 2018 and has been participating indirectly in the current talks as it seeks to rejoin the agreement, had confirmed that it would send a delegation led by Robert Malley, the special US envoy for Iran, to Vienna over the weekend. But the talks on Thursday reportedly ended an hour after they began, after the negotiators “observed a number of important commonalities in there [sic] positions,” Russia’s representative, Mikhail Ulyanov, tweeted. Iran has said that the main roadblock to signing a new deal is the refusal by the United States to lift all sanctions on the Islamic Republic. The US and European negotiators have said that Iran is not serious about the negotiations. France’s Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian told a French parliament committee on Tuesday that the world powers fear that Iran is attempting to draw out the talks in order to continue to develop their nuclear program.