Iran wants guarantees.
Iran is planning to set out a series of proposals for a new nuclear pact, including guarantees from the Trump administration that the US won’t leave a future accord….
And this:
In addition to the guarantees, the Iranians expect to discuss ways that their current stockpile of enriched uranium could be managed under a deal. They also plan to discuss a process for lifting economic sanctions….
What guarantee is Iran offering that it won’t violate any new nuclear pact? What guarantee is it capable of offering, given its history of routinely violating the prior pact—which has continued in force with the other signatories after the US withdrew from it?
Even before the US withdrew, Iran routinely hid accord-inspectable sites from inspectors, denied inspector accesses to other sites, and continued enriching uranium far beyond accord limits.
Today, the only way to handle that enriched uranium is to transfer all of it out of Iran into and under the control of a separate, neutral nation. Switzerland comes to mind, if it’s will to accept the responsibility. Otherwise, the enriched uranium must be destroyed altogether.
Today, the only guarantee Iran could offer—to the extent it would honor even this—would be, in addition to provably ridding itself of all of its uranium, enriched or still in the ore, is to have all of its centrifuges shipped out of Iran to that neutral nation, or destroyed. In conjunction with that, Iran must allow inspectors access, on a no-notice basis, to any location those inspectors decide they want to look into, and those inspections must be carried out without Iranian escort whatsoever; the only escort must be protection-capable teams from non-Iranian signatory nations. Those teams also must be authorized to and capable of destroying on the spot any violations they discover.
Sanctions then might be liftable, but only after a period of years of Iranian proven performance under this new deal, a performance that must be unanimously agreed by the non-Iranian signatories. Given trustworthiness of the current Iranian government incumbents, that period of years clock cannot begin until after the current incumbents—every single one of them—is replaced by the Iranian people themselves, whose choices must be from a slate of candidates uninfluenced in any way by the government’s candidate selection committee.
Iran’s claim that its nuclear program is entirely for peaceful purposes would be risible were it not such an obvious lie. Iran government officials, from Khamenei on down, routinely chant “Death to Israel” and “Death to America.” An erstwhile President of Iran, Ali Akhbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, said (quoted by MEMRI)
If one day, he [Rafsanjani] said, the world of Islam comes to possess the weapons currently in Israel’s possession [meaning nuclear weapons]—on that day this method of global arrogance would come to a dead end. This, he said, is because the use of a nuclear bomb in Israel will leave nothing on the ground, whereas it will only damage the world of Islam.
That baldly stated threat has never been repudiated since, and it stands as firmly against any believability of Iranian guarantees made by that government’s incumbents or likely successors as does those incumbents’ performance under the prior accord.