This looks pretty terrible. Awaiting a formal Iranian response, but there’s no doubt that diplomatic outreach to Iran on the nuclear question suffers tremendously if Iran rejects the Vienna deal. Desired strategies have to bow to emergent realities, in the final analysis, and Iran just doesn’t appear like it will accept an eminently reasonable deal that would buy time for a diplomatic thaw. If this is indeed Iran’s formal response to Vienna, than sanctions look more likely now, and, frankly, appropriate.
Update: via @stevehynd:
But Mrs Clinton, speaking from Pakistan where she is on a whirlwind diplomatic mission to shore-up support for US interests, did not say what conditions would lead Washington to slap fresh sanctions on Iran, and added: ‘We are working to determine exactly what they are willing to do, whether this was an initial response that is an end response or whether it’s the beginning of getting to where we expect them to end up.’



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So that’s it, huh? We asked for diplomatic negotiations. And in this case, a complete set of negotiations consists of one (1) offer and one (1) counteroffer. That’s it, fuck negotiations, we tried and they just didn’t work – let’s start heading down a path to war.
Can you name any other set of diplomatic negotiations limited to a couple weeks and one counteroffer? Jeez, if we wanted it to look like utter theater to provide cover for additional sanctions and threats of war, we could NOT have come up with a more perfect scenario. If that’s all the ‘diplomacy’ we were interested in ‘trying’, honestly, why bother at all?
mikey
OK, fair point. But if they’re rejecting the guts of the outside-enrichment deal, then what else are we to negotiate?
Considering they have the right to the fuel cycle under NPT and they have not diverted one gram of fissile material or even begun a process to enrich above 3.8%, there’s a vast amount that can be negotiated – mostly, if we were to be practical about it, would be around further safeguards to prevent weaponization. If the entire process stops and starts with “ship all your legal and harmless LEU out of the country” you haven’t accomplished anything, except perhaps some leverage to prevent the IDF and Likud from starting a regional war – which would be a good thing, but there’s plenty of time to arrive at an overall framework for an Iranian civilian nuclear program…