Iran-US to hold 5th round of nuclear talks: What to expect

The US and Iran are set to pick up where they left off – talking about Tehran’s nuclear programme.

Officials from the US and Iran will meet in Rome for their fifth round of negotiations.

The negotiators previously met in Rome and Muscat.

This came after US President Donald Trump vowed a “maximum pressure” campaign against Iran – urged on no doubt by ally Israel.

While Trump has mused about conducting a military strike on Iran, he has also said a deal could possibly be reached.

Trump even penned a letter to Iran’s 86-year-old Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei – which led to these talks.

Khamenei has warned the US that Iran would respond to any attack with its own action.

But what do we know about Trump’s letter and Iran’s nuclear programme? How did things between us and Iran go so wrong?

Let’s take a closer look

Trump’s letter to Iran

Trump sent the letter to Khamenei on March 5.

The next day, he gave a television interview in which he acknowledged sending it.

“I’ve written them a letter saying, ‘I hope you’re going to negotiate because if we have to go in militarily, it’s going to be a terrible thing.’”

Since returning to the White House, Trump has alternately been suggesting talks and threatening Iran with strikes.

Trump previously wrote a letter to Khamenei, which resulted in an angry response.

Though Trump’s letters to Kim Jong-un during his first term led to the leaders meeting, he could not pull of an agreement curbing North Korea’s missile program.

What about previous talks?

Oman, a sultanate on the eastern edge of the Arabian Peninsula, has hosted the three rounds of talks between Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi and US Mideast envoy Steve Witkoff. The two men have met face to face after indirect talks, a rare occurrence due to the decades of tensions between the countries.

It hasn’t been all smooth, however. Witkoff at one point made a television appearance in which he suggested 3.67 per cent enrichment for Iran could be something the countries could agree on.

But that’s exactly the terms set by the 2015 nuclear deal struck under U.S. President Barack Obama, from which Trump unilaterally withdrew America.

Witkoff, Trump and other American officials in the time since have maintained Iran can have no enrichment under any deal, something to which Tehran insists it won’t agree.

Despite that, Iran and the US have held expert-level talks. Experts described that as a positive sign, though much likely remains to be agreed before reaching a tentative deal.

What about Iran’s nuclear ambitions?

Iran has insisted for decades that its nuclear program is peaceful. However, its officials increasingly threaten to pursue a nuclear weapon. Iran now enriches uranium to near weapons-grade levels of 60 per cent the only country in the world without a nuclear weapons program to do so.

Under the original 2015 nuclear deal, Iran was allowed to enrich uranium up to 3.67 per cent purity and to maintain a uranium stockpile of 300 kilograms (661 pounds). The last report by the International Atomic Energy Agency on Iran’s program put its stockpile at 8,294.4 kilograms (18,286 pounds) as it enriches a fraction of it to 60 per cent purity.

US intelligence agencies assess that Iran has yet to begin a weapons program, but has “undertaken activities that better position it to produce a nuclear device, if it chooses to do so.”

Ali Larijani, an adviser to Iran’s supreme leader, has warned in a televised interview that his country has the capability to build nuclear weapons, but it is not pursuing it and has no problem with the IAEA’s inspections.

However, he said if the US or Israel were to attack Iran over the issue, the country would have no choice but to move toward nuclear weapon development.

“If you make a mistake regarding Iran’s nuclear issue, you will force Iran to take that path, because it must defend itself,” he said.

How did things go so wrong?

It wasn’t always this way.

Iran was once one of the US’ stop allies in the Mideast under Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.

The Shah purchased American military weapons and allowed CIA technicians to run secret listening posts monitoring the neighbouring Soviet Union. The CIA had fomented a 1953 coup that cemented the Shah’s rule.

But in January 1979, the Shah, fatally ill with cancer, fled Iran as mass demonstrations swelled against his rule. The Islamic Revolution followed, led by Grand Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, and created Iran’s theocratic government.

Later that year, university students overran the US Embassy in Tehran, seeking the shah’s extradition and sparking the 444-day hostage crisis that saw diplomatic relations between Iran and the US severed.

The Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s saw the US back Saddam Hussein. The “Tanker War” during that conflict saw the US launch a one-day assault that crippled Iran at sea, while the US later shot down an Iranian commercial airliner that the American military said it mistook for a warplane.

Ever since then, Iran and the US have see-sawed between enmity and grudging diplomacy

Relations peaking when Tehran made the 2015 nuclear deal with world powers. But Trump unilaterally withdrew America from the accord in 2018, sparking tensions in the West Asia that persist till today.

With inputs from agencies