Israeli Premier Benjamin Netanyahu slammed Iran for entertaining diplomacy with the international community whilst simultaneously pursuing its nuclear ambitions Wednesday in a meeting with Norwegian Foreign Minister Espen Barth Eide, as he warned that issues concerning Middle East peace “will be overshadowed if Iran believes it has a license to develop atomic weapons”.
Positioning the Islamist regime’s nuclear aspirations as the most fundamental threat to the region, the acting Israeli Foreign Minister issued a promise that should regional “quiet be violated, we will respond accordingly”. “The security of Israel's citizens is my chief concern and we will know how to defend the security of our people,” he added.
Responding to the charge Eide conceded he was “concerned about the lack of cooperation” from Iran, who he accused of attempting to blindside the international community and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) by failing to reveal the real focus of its nuclear development activity, as he vowed to “raise the volume” on its investigation into the nature of Iran’s atomic weapons programme.
Elsewhere, following a meeting in Ankara with Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davitoglu Wednesday ahead of Friday’s next round of two-day talks between international negotiators and Iran in Kazakhstan, EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton expressed her hopes that “Iran will now carefully consider the proposal we put on the table and respond to it”, in light of last month’s inconclusive Almaty negotiations, which saw Ashton preside over the P5+1’s reviewed offer to Iran.
At a background briefing in Washington prior to the start of the next round of talks, the US State Department insisted that last month’s meeting of technical experts in Istanbul which closely followed the Almaty talks had not been classified as a negotiation, but rather was purported as a a chance to review “he confidence-building measure proposal that we presented in Almaty so that they could go over the technical details”. This provided the Islamist regime with a chance to ask more detailed questions on the nature of the international delegation’s revised proposal and served as “strictly an experts-level technical discussion”.
Of the unsuccessful negotiations last month, the department spokesman insisted that the P5+1 had been faced with the “difficult” prospect of breathing life back into talks which had lain dormant throughout the preceding six months, but had nevertheless been a reminder of the enduring “unity of the P5+1 and the determination by all to resolve the Iranian nuclear issue diplomatically if there is any way possible to do so”.
Friday’s meeting he added would provide an opportunity of building on the “momentum generated over the past month or so” following the first Almaty meeting and subsequent technical talks, as he concluded that any widely-anticipated concrete results would depend “on what the Iranians come back with in terms of a response on the substance to our proposal”.
International pressure on the regime combined with continued efforts at diplomacy remained the international community’s greatest tool, he added as he extolled the success of economic sanctios to date, cautioning that “that pressure only will increase if Iran does not begin to take concrete steps and concrete actions”.
Echoing what he characterised as Ashton’s own brand of “cautious optimism”, he warned that the precise outcome of the talks remained in the hands of Iranian negotiators who have continued to stall reaching a substantive agreements with their international foes, concluding: “We hope Iran comes prepared, makes a substantive and concrete response that really enters into serious and substantive negotiations to meet the international community’s concerns.”