Kerry in New Iran Talks as U.S. Political Storm Rages
Iran nuclear talks enter their critical end-game Sunday with U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry due to meet his Iranian counterpart in Switzerland as a March 31 deadline looms and a political storm rages in Washington.
After a decade of crisis, 18 months of talks and two missed deadlines, six world powers aim by the end of this month to nail down the outline of a deal with Iran that would put making a nuclear bomb out of Tehran's reach.
The parties hope to reach a full accord by July 1.
But as time runs short tempers have been boiling over in the United States, putting Kerry and U.S. President Barack Obama under immense pressure.
Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has meanwhile criticized the two-step process, saying matters should be handled in one fell swoop. He is due to give a closely watched Iranian New Year's address on March 21.
On Thursday Khamenei said the other side in the talks was "deceitful and stabs in the back," according to news agency ISNA.
Kerry, currently attending an investment conference in Egypt, will travel to the Swiss city of Lausanne Sunday to meet Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif.
The U.S. negotiating team, including chief negotiator Under Secretary of State Wendy Sherman and Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz, are scheduled to join him in Lausanne, the State Department said Friday.
With uncertainty still surrounding the deal, remained unclear how long Kerry will stay in Lausanne nor when he is expected to return to Washington.
Zarif is meanwhile due to take a break from the talks with Kerry on Monday to meet EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini and her French, German and British counterparts, before returning to Switzerland, according to his ministry.
On March 9, 47 Republican U.S. senators wrote an open letter to Iran's leaders warning that any nuclear deal could be modified by Congress or revoked "with the stroke of a pen" by Obama's successors.
This followed an address to U.S. lawmakers -- on a Republican invitation -- by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu when he warned that the mooted deal would leave Iran's nuclear program "largely intact".
Obama said it was "somewhat ironic to see some members of Congress wanting to make common cause with hardliners in Iran". Kerry called the missive "irresponsible".
Zarif, who together with reformist President Hassan Rouhani is also under pressure from Iranian hardliners, was scathing about the letter from U.S. "extremists", saying it had "no legal value".
"In truth, it told us that we cannot trust the United States," Zarif told top clerics.
The so-called P5+1 group of world powers -- the U.S., Russia, China, Britain, France and Germany -- want Iran to shrink its nuclear activities to extend to at least a year the "breakout time" Iran would, in theory, need to assemble a bomb's worth of fissile material.
Iran, which insists its nuclear activities are purely for peaceful purposes, meanwhile wants painful U.N. and Western sanctions lifted.
In November 2013, Iran and the P5+1 agreed an interim accord involving a partial nuclear freeze by Iran and minor sanctions relief.
After numerous rounds of talks, negotiators have twice failed to meet two self-imposed deadlines -- last July and then November -- to reach a lasting deal.
Diplomats say there has been progress in some areas, including changing the design of the Arak reactor that could give Iran weapons-grade plutonium once operational.
But the key issue of the future scale of Iran's uranium enrichment capacities -- producing nuclear fuel but also potentially bomb material -- remains unresolved.
Other thorny topics involve the pace at which sanctions would be suspended and eventually lifted and the duration of the mooted accord. France believes the 10 years suggested in some quarters is not enough.