What just happened
- Two teenagers were arrested in Manchester after a Briton from Blackburn took four people hostage in a Texas synagogue and was killed in the ensuing siege.
- Sweden sent troops to the island of Gotland in the Baltic, saying a Russian attack could not be ruled out.
- Antonio Horta-Osorio resigned as chairman of Credit Suisse after admitting to breaking Covid rules last year.
All is not lost in Vienna. Before Christmas, efforts to revive the Iran nuclear deal looked likely to founder on mutual mistrust between Tehran (under new hardline management) and DC (where old hawks on Capitol Hill have the whip hand). But dogged diplomacy and a convergence of interests may have shifted the roadblock. Hopes are rising of progress on uranium enrichment, sanctions relief – and hostages:
The optimists:
- “Reaching an accord is possible,” Josep Borrell, the EU foreign policy chief, said on Friday.
- “Good progress” was made thanks to the efforts of all parties, Iran’s foreign ministry said earlier last week.
- Russia’s deputy foreign minister said the chances of reaching a solution had risen.
- And relatives of hostages being held in Iran have spoken of fresh hopes since Christmas; of the basics of a deal being assembled late last year; and of a moment of truth approaching in Vienna within the next few weeks.
The reality checks:
- France and the US continue to express misgivings – the former worried about time running out for negotiations and the latter conscious that any deal that appears soft on Iran might founder in the Senate.
- Substantive sticking points remain on sanctions relief, which will be hard to prove because some sanctions unrelated to nuclear activity will remain in place; on American guarantees, which aren’t worth much following Trump’s withdrawal from the deal in 2018; on how far Iran will have to roll back its enrichment programme; and on how to verify Iranian compliance.
But there’s little doubt the mood music in Vienna has changed. Aras Amiri, a British Council employee held hostage in Tehran since 2018 was released last week. Iran’s leadership knows its chances of significant US sanctions relief will shrink sharply from early November if Republicans take back control of the US Congress in the midterms, as expected. And negotiators in the Austrian capital have started talking about practical alternatives being floated to western powers’ original demand that Iran’s uranium centrifuges be destroyed. There is “a range of intermediate solutions,” one diplomat tells AFP, including locking up rather than breaking up the hardware at enrichment facilities at Natanz and elsewhere.
Where does this leave Richard Ratcliffe, husband of Nazanin Zagari-Ratcliffe, the British hostage held in Tehran since 2016? Cautiously optimistic. Amiri’s release was “a good sign for the rest of us,” he said last week. But only if Iran and the P5 + 1 (the permanent members of the UN Security Council, plus Russia) decide to seize the moment.
A window has opened. There are signs that, for now, Iran’s need for sanctions relief outweighs its leaders’ mistrust of the US, and that the Biden administration might have more luck selling an Iran deal than its own Build Back Better agenda at home. The window could slam shut at any time, and that, too, will focus minds.
On March 23 2020 Boris Johnson told the country: “From this evening I must give the British people a very simple instruction – you must stay at home. Because the critical thing we must do is stop the disease spreading between households.” He is now understood to have pre-recorded this broadcast and then moved, against his own freshly issued guidance, to his second home. Downing Street have refused repeatedly to deny to Tortoise that is what happened, and when pressed on this period again today at a lobby briefing, a spokesperson failed to give a clear answer. Read more
