Five days left until the quarterly meeting of the International Atomic Energy Agency’s 35-nation Board of Governors, media reports suggest that some European countries are still uncertain whether to support an anti-Iran resolution during the upcoming session.
Diplomatic sources close to the European troika (Britain, France, and Germany) have indicated that the US and its three top European allies are divided over whether to again use the lever of a resolution against Iran 18 months after the Board of Governors last took such a step, Reuters news agency reported on Friday.
“A resolution has been prepared,” a European diplomat told Reuters. Others confirmed the E3 had prepared a draft, but has not submitted it to the Board members.
"...We have to move forward with this resolution ... The Americans are the difficulty, and in our conversations we continue to do everything to convince them,” the diplomat was quoted as saying.
According to Reuters, the main argument the US officials make in not seeking a potential resolution against Iran is to avoid giving the country "a pretext to respond" by ramping up its nuclear activities, as it has done in the past.
Wall Street Journal has said in a report that the UK and France have told the US that they aim to issue a strict resolution against Iran. It noted that the probable defeat of the resolution in the Board of Governors would be a big diplomatic victory for Tehran, indicating the collapse of the Western unity for exerting pressure on Iran.
At a time when major US media and think tanks admit that Washington has been defeated by Iran’s regional agenda, especially after its strong April operation against the Zionist territories, the US administration is not inclined to open a new front with Iran over its nuclear program.
On the other hand, the ambiguous situation of Joe Biden in the Democrats' electoral camp on the eve of the US presidential election and the inflammatory conditions in West Asia, where the Zionist tensions have shrunk the US military power and foreign policy potentials in the region, have made Washington to avoid nuclear tension with Iran.
These events depict a comic and semi-tragic condition in dealing with nuclear developments as the three European countries which were once supposed to fill the gap of the US in the JCPOA after the US withdrawal from the accord, have now become more radical than the US itself so that the Western media say the US is trying to moderate the strict approaches of the three European parties to the declining nuclear deal of 2015.
It has been 18 months since the West sought a resolution against Iran, which incurred costs for the US, Europe, and particularly Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency Rafael Grossi and his colleagues at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
The issuance of two resolutions in 2020 was met with Iran's serious and retaliatory response. After the first resolution, Iran terminated all its confidence-building beyond safeguard cooperation and removed more than 20 IAEA surveillance cameras from nuclear facilities.
Following the second resolution of the IAEA Board of Governors in 2020, Iran announced the start of production of 60 percent uranium in the Fordow strategic complex, the use of advanced IR-6 machines instead of first-generation centrifuges, equipping Fordow B Hall with eight new chains, as well as gassing two new chains of advanced machines in Natanz.
In such circumstances, it has been reported that the anti-Iran resolution draft has been limitedly distributed among 35 member states. It seems that if a resolution is issued against Iran at the next week's Governing Council meeting, Tehran will react and take countermeasures, based on previous experience with resolutions.
The West's reliance on leverage has repeatedly lost its effectiveness before and had nothing for three European countries and the US. This will negatively affect the Agency's cooperation with Iran more than anything else, a channel that the IAEA Director General has painstakingly sought to keep alive. The path that resulted in an understanding between Iran and Grossi in March 2023, but due to unwise decisions of the West, it would be vulnerable.
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