For its part, the administration has continued to warn that negotiating time is running out, without saying how much time is left or what it will do if it expires.
“We don’t have a timetable,” a senior State Department official said. “Our position is that we’re ready to go back” to the table, although “at some point, that won’t be possible any more, because their nuclear advances will become irreversible, and it simply will not be feasible to go back the deal” as it was initially negotiated.
“We’ll know it when we see it,” said the official, speaking on condition of anonymity about the sensitive negotiations. “When we reach that point, we’ll have to assess where we are and how we proceed.”
Some answers may emerge this week when the Tehran government says Iran’s new foreign minister, Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, plans to hold bilateral meetings with his counterparts from Britain, Germany and France at the annual United Nations General Assembly.
In a prerecorded speech to the General Assembly later Tuesday, President Ebrahim Raisi said Iran “considers useful the talks whose ultimate outcome is the lifting of all oppressive sanctions,” but gave no indication of when the Vienna negotiations should restart.
Raisi devoted much of his relatively brief address to criticizing the United States and its sanctions policy, which he called a “new way of war with the rest of the world.” He repeated Iran’s long-standing insistence that nuclear weapons “have no place in our defense doctrine,” and are “forbidden” based on a religious decree by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Iranian supreme leader.