US Iran envoy: Prospect of nuclear talks “not tying our hands”
“At the end of day, what happens in Iran will be decided and determined by the Iranian people,” US Iran envoy Rob Malley said Oct. 31.
US Iran envoy Rob Malley said today that the Iranian people, not the United States or other foreign powers, will determine what demands they make of their government, but said the US administration would seek to keep the international spotlight on regime abuses, speak up for protesters’ human rights, and try to adjust U.S. sanctions to help the Iranian people be able to communicate with each other and the outside world. The prospect of resumed nuclear talks at some point is not “trying our hands,” he said.
“There is nothing now that we are not doing because we're thinking… of a potential nuclear deal in the future,” Malley told the Carnegie Endowment’s Aaron David Miller in a conversation broadcast on Youtube today (Oct. 31).
“No, we are taking action,” he said. “We're not waiting. We're taking the action that we think is consistent and necessary to promote our values and our national security interests. We do believe that preventing Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon is fundamental… and we will continue to see what we can do to achieve that goal. But in the meantime, we are not deterring ourselves in taking the other steps that we think are necessary to advance our interests or values.”
As for Iranian protesters’ demands, “it’s not up to us,” Malley said. “It’s certainly not up to me to characterize what the people on the streets of Iran, particularly the women who are demonstrating, what they want. They’re doing a very good job themselves expressing their demands and their aspirations.”
Malley said he’d apologized for an Oct. 22 tweet in which, in expressing international solidarity shown for the Iranian protesters, he’d characterized their demands as being for the Iranian government to respect their dignity and human rights. Some Iranian activists had objected to the tweet, saying what Iranian protesters are demanding is regime change.
But Malley made clear that US policy is not trying to foment Iranian regime change.
“We’ve been very clear in terms of our policy, that our policy is not one of… interfering to try to foment regime change,” he said. “It's one of supporting the basic rights of the Iranian people,… and we're not going to apologize for it because we're going to continue doing it.”
He said it was seemingly inevitable the Iranian regime would portray the protests as being a foreign plot, but said he thought most Iranian people saw through that. When “this level of fury is being generated by the policies of the regime, you cannot convince anyone that it's being in any way micromanaged by the US,” he said.
As for the nuclear talks, Malley said there had been no movement since early September, but he did not rule out diplomacy resuming at some later point. And he said whether or not such nuclear diplomacy resumes, the fact that the US had not pulled the plug on the 2015 Iran nuclear deal is not preventing the US from speaking up for the rights of Iranian protesters, sanctioning Iran violence and drone shipments to Russia.
“We're committed to preventing Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon,” Malley said. “We believe diplomacy is the best way of doing it.”
“I understand when people say, ‘why don't you walk away.’ But they may be under the mis-impression that the fact that…there are talks that are in abeyance…that somehow it's constraining our policy options on other front,” he said. “It is not.”
Recent US sanctions, Malley noted, have targeted not just senior officials but also mid-level officials alleged to have been involved in the regime’s crackdown on the “Women Life Freedom” protests spurred by the death of Mahsa Amini following her arrest by Iran’s so-called morality police, now in their second month.
Iranian stalemate
The Iranian government likely wants to have the protests subside before possibly resuming nuclear talks, but seems to be in an extended stalemate with protesters, suggested Ali Alfoneh, an Iran analyst at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington.
“Right now we are in a situation where the protesters cannot overthrow the government—they lack leadership, funding, organization—but the government is incapable of persuading the protesters to go home,” Alfoneh said in a phone interview. “They are in a stalemate.”
“The problem with the stalemate for the government is that [over time], it gives a bigger chance for the emergence of a leadership and organization,” he said. “The revolution gives birth to its own leadership.”
An Iranian source said he assessed that the Iranian government had likely been waiting for the outcome of US midterms in November to resume nuclear talks, but now may be inhibited from returning to the table if and until the protests subside, out of concern the other parties could see the domestic turmoil as weakening their negotiating position.
“I think the reality is they are waiting for the results of the US midterms,” the Iranian source, speaking not for attribution, said of the Iranian government.
“The second issue is the domestic turmoil in Iran,” the Iranian source said. “In the current Iranian situation, even if we would not have Congressional elections, the Iranian team cannot come to the negotiations and show flexibility. They may think the international community would consider it as a point of weakness.”
“First they need to manage the current unrest inside Iran,” he said. It was his assessment that “they would manage in some weeks and this would be over, sooner or later.”
A European diplomat was extremely pessimistic that the deal could be revived.
Iran would need to give “a positive signal,” he said.