August 9, 2022: "Washington is ready to quickly conclude an agreement with Iran," said The New York Times, citing a State Department spokesperson, even with all the caution in the world. "The nuclear agreement with Iran is imminent", headlined the Al Jazeera website on the 19th of that month. Just three months later, the United States and Iran return to full confrontation.
The final straw for the talks to return to the 2015 nuclear pact, and with it the suspension of sanctions against Iran in exchange for a substantial containment of its atomic program, was put by Tehran on Tuesday by announcing that the country had begun to produce 60% pure uranium at the Fordo underground plant. The Islamic Republic was already enriching uranium to that scale at its Natanz plant, but the expansion marks a further step towards obtaining enough material to make the atomic bomb. The announcement came to formalize the rupture strictly related to the nuclear pact that the US and the rest of the great powers, with the mediation of the European Union, were supposedly preparing to recover.
But the increase in the production of enriched uranium, announced in response to complaints from the International Atomic Energy Agency about Iran's lack of cooperation in monitoring its nuclear facilities, added to a chain of grievances and provocations in other areas. which in fact made any kind of reconciliation between Tehran and Washington impossible, however partial.
The harsh repression of the protests over the death of the young Kurdish woman Mahsa Amini when, on September 16, she was in police custody for not wearing her veil as required by law, as well as the help that Tehran is providing to Vladimir Putin's army in the invasion of Ukraine, they are seen by the Government of Joe Biden as acts of frontal hostility incompatible with a negotiation.
"There is no diplomacy with Iran at this time," said White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby a few weeks ago. “We are at a dead end, and we are not focused on the diplomatic track,” he added. And on Tuesday he reaffirmed that Washington "will not allow Iran to achieve nuclear weapons capability."
Not a week goes by without the State Department announcing sanctions against senior Iranian officials and leaders, either for the deaths, torture, and imprisonment of protesters against the dictatorship of the veil; either in relation to sending drones to the Russian army for use against Ukraine –often on civilian targets–; or for violating sanctions or bans in force, for example, on the sale of Iranian oil and petrochemical products.
On the front of internal protests, Iran has not stopped intensifying its repression operations and extending them to the Kurdish minority, both in the west of the country and in northern Iraq. There, forces from the IRGC body attacked last Monday, with drones and missiles, the headquarters of "dissident groups" in Iraqi Kurdistan.
Armored units and special forces of this body were heading yesterday to the border regions of western and northwestern Iran, home to the Kurdish minority, to reinforce the repression against "dissidents". And in the southeastern province of Sistan-Baluchistan, human rights organizations have reported dozens of deaths in the last two months.
In Ukraine, meanwhile, the secretary of the National Defense Council, Oleksi Danilov, told The Guardian yesterday that the army had killed "several" of the IRGC instructors who had arrived in Crimea a few weeks ago to teach the Russians to operate the drones that Iran had sent there to help the Russians in the war. Israeli sources spoke of ten dead Iranian advisers.
Between one and the other, this is not the ideal environment for dialogue between Washington and Tehran.
