The US and Iran’s failure to reach a deal was “to be expected,” with both delegations arriving at their first high-level talks in decades with “maximalist positions,” political scientist Benjamin Radd told CNN.
Radd pointed to Iran’s nuclear enrichment program as a likely sticking point, and broke it down in plain terms.
Iran will maintain that the 2015 Iran nuclear deal “was a pledge on their part not to build a weapon” and a commitment “to not acquiring the technology for a weapon or developing one of their own,” said Radd, a senior fellow at UCLA.
“The issue remains Iran’s enrichment to breakout levels, basically to a threshold beyond what the NPT treaty allows, and close to nuclear bomb territory,” he added.
The NPT is an international treaty aimed at preventing the spread of nuclear weapons, promoting peaceful nuclear energy and advancing global disarmament.
“So from Iran’s position, it has the absolute right as a sovereign nation to enrich uranium and the United States is maintaining that Iran has forfeited the trust and the right, under the NPT, to enrich uranium. So there in lies the impasse.”
He added: “The United States believes that Iran has essentially forfeited that, given its past actions at deceiving international inspectors, and Iran feels it does not need to give that up, especially now that it has the strait of hormuz as a leverage point.”