Samuel Ramani, Tutor of Politics and International Reations at University of Oxford discussed the indirect and constructive Iran-US talks.
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00:00I'm joined now by Samuel Romani. He's a tutor of politics and international relations at Oxford University.
00:06Samuel, thank you so much for your time.
00:08These talks are indirect. This is the third round. We're hearing constructive used to describe them.
00:15Do you see any real signs of progress so far?
00:19Well, I think that there's a little word of exactly what's happened out of these talks.
00:23I mean, either Iraq, Xi, Norwalkov have released any statements about the Iranian or the U.S. positions.
00:28But there also isn't that much optimism.
00:30The Trump administration is making it very clear that if there was no agreement,
00:35there would be a potential military strike on Iranian nuclear facilities within two months,
00:39and there'd be an increase in American forces in the region.
00:41The Iranians offered an interim nuclear deal to the United States that the U.S. didn't seem to want to go along with.
00:48And there also seemed to be drastically different interpretations about how much enrichment is acceptable.
00:52Steve Wyckoff was widely criticized within the Republican Party for even allowing for 3.45 percent.
00:58Nikki Haley, for example, wants none, whereas the Iranians want to have much more substantial enrichment and missile capabilities.
01:06We're also hearing that Iran's missile program might be something of a red line,
01:13which obviously is not directly linked to the nuclear program at all.
01:16But it seems there's a lot at play here.
01:19Could you talk to us about what could be the various red lines in these negotiations?
01:25Well, one of the big concerns and one of the big Republican criticisms of the Obama-Iran nuclear deal,
01:32the JCPOA of 2015, was that it dealt with nuclear issues in a silo,
01:37and it didn't deal with the other threats that Iran poses,
01:40in particular the threat posed by their ballistic missile program,
01:43but also their regional activities in Syria, Lebanon, and Yemen, and their broader threat to Israel.
01:49It seems as if this current set of agreements have compartmentalized the regional activities,
01:52but they haven't compartmentalized the ballistic missiles.
01:56The U.S. sees ballistic missile development as merely a delivery mechanism for potential nukes,
02:01whereas Iran views that as an entirely separate issue that's legitimate self-defense that shouldn't be regulated.
02:08We know that what Iran wants is to get their sanctions lifted, which are, frankly, crippling the country.
02:15Are they in a stronger or weaker position than they were, say, in 2018?
02:20Well, I think that they're in some ways in a weaker position,
02:22because the Israelis have been able to show that they can decimate a lot of their aligned militia groups,
02:28as we've seen with the Hamas and Hezbollah.
02:31The Houthis have been holding up more resiliently in the face of a U.S. onslaught,
02:34and the Iraqi PMF remains largely intact.
02:37But Iran's asymmetric retaliation capacity has diminished,
02:41and the perception in Washington is that Iran is at a weak point,
02:43and we can get a tough deal out of them, a much tougher deal than we could have gotten before.
02:47But the Iranians still have staying power.
02:51I mean, they've been under these sanctions for decades now,
02:54and they've been able to source and develop stronger partnerships with Russia and China.
02:58The sanctions are not going to lead to internal instability or change of government in Iran.
03:03So the Iranians have staying power, but they do want the sanctions to be lifted,
03:06and the Americans see them as weak.
03:08So that's why they're driving a harder and harder deal,
03:10and that's making it harder for the Iranians to accept any deal.
03:13Yeah, and of course the U.S. is saying if we don't make a deal,
03:16then we're going to have a real problem, and we will resort to war.
03:20How real do you think that threat is,
03:22given that we're not seeing a huge amount of progress at this point in the talks,
03:26and we know how long these talks have taken in the past?
03:30Well, given the fact that the Trump administration has a history of escalating in terms of threats with Iran,
03:36and then ultimately dialing down in its responses,
03:39I think the Iranians are comfortable that they can kind of weather the storm.
03:42There was obviously a lot of concern when the Iranian-backed Houthi militias
03:45struck up Haik Aramco oil facilities in Saudi Arabia in 2019,
03:50that there was going to be an escalation.
03:51That didn't happen.
03:52When Soleimani died, it was an isolated event in 2020.
03:56There wasn't a broader war.
03:57So I think the Iranians will think that Trump has a history of barking very loud
04:01when it comes to these threats, and then ultimately not delivering on them.
04:04One of the reasons why I think that Trump is doing this
04:07is because Obama effectively kind of ruled out a military solution to the question
04:11and pursued negotiations without that stick.
04:13And Trump saw that as a mistake,
04:15and Trump is using that threat as bargaining leverage with the Iranians,
04:19thinking that it's going to lead to a better outcome.
04:21Thank you so much for chatting to us.
04:23That is Samuel Romagna,
04:24tutor of Politics and International Relations at Oxford University.