Nuke deal talks are an American ‘trap,’ Iran claims

Tehran’s complaint comes ahead of Sunday’s fourth round of negotiations.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

Through an anonymous official, Iran accused the United States on Saturday of staging nuclear talks as a “trap,” just ahead of Sunday’s fourth round of negotiations between the two countries.

In an interview with CNN, the official said that the indirect negotiations over Iran’s run to a nuclear bomb, which Teheran denies, were “not genuine” and that the Americans had always seen them as a “trap to draw the situation toward tension.”

To back up his claim, the official said that the Americans were providing only “short and general answers” to questions, ignoring “main proposals,” and “constantly chang[ing] its position” between one round of talks and the next.

This has brought Tehran to the determination that there will be no lifting of President Donald Trump’s financial “maximum pressure campaign,” and, therefore, the Islamic Republic is “preparing for the next stage, with political, economic, and other sectors having prepared the necessary scenarios over the past month.”

In a different venue and speaking on the record, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi also complained on Saturday that his country had received “contradictory messages” from the American side as “different individuals express different views.”

A U.S. official swiftly denied the official’s charge, telling CNN that “President Trump is completely sincere in his desire to reach a deal with Iran and is completely committed to getting one.”

Iran was seemingly angered by a Friday interview that White House Special Envoy to the Middle East Steve Witkoff gave to Breitbart News, in which he had stated, “An enrichment program can never exist in the state of Iran ever again. That’s our red line. No enrichment.”

“That means dismantlement, it means no weaponization, and it means that Natanz, Fordow and Isfahan – those are their three enrichment facilities – have to be dismantled,” he continued.

Araghchi rejected the idea outright, saying that “if the aim of these talks is to limit Iran’s nuclear rights, I state clearly that Iran will not back down from any of its rights.”

Other Iranian officials have insisted that Tehran had red lines too. They said it would not end its uranium enrichment, which has progressed to the point of being one very short step away from producing enough bomb-quality material to make about half a dozen nuclear devices.

Iran would also not transfer its nuclear stockpile to a third country, which is what it did when it signed the original nuclear deal with the Obama administration in 2015, sending most of its enriched uranium to Russia.

Witkoff seemingly upped the ante in his interview regarding the talks, putting both a deadline and a possible threat on the table. “If [negotiations] are not productive on Sunday, then they won’t continue and we’ll have to take a different route,” he said.

This could be a reference to allowing Israel to destroy all of Iran’s nuclear facilities that its planes can reach, a threat that Jerusalem has made repeatedly since taking out Iran’s major air defenses last year, when it left the country virtually unprotected from a major strike.

The United States could help either by turning it into a joint mission or by providing the IDF with its heaviest bombs to enable the destruction of Iran’s most sensitive installations that have been dug deep into the mountains.

The “different route” might also be diplomatic. Trump is set to travel to American allies Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates thiw week.

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