A key US lawmaker asserted that five of the six world powers negotiating with Iran over its nuclear program have stepped back leaving Washington to hammer out a deal with Tehran.
“It’s evident that these negotiations are really not P5+1 (the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, namely the United States, Britain, China, France, Russia, plus Germany) negotiations anymore,” Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Corker claimed as he emerged from a closed-door briefing by Obama administration officials on the status of nuclear talks with Iran on Tuesday, AFP reported.
“It’s really more of a bilateral negotiation between the United States and Iran.”
“I was in Munich this weekend (for an international security conference) and was very aware that this was becoming more of a one-on-one negotiation,” the Senate Republican told reporters..
Corker and the Democrat he replaced as committee chairman, Senator Robert Menendez, left the latest briefing expressing concern about the administration basing negotiations on the need to maintain Iran’s potential nuclear “breakout” time to at least one year.
“One of my major concerns all along that is becoming more crystal clear to me, is that we are, instead of preventing proliferation, we are managing proliferation,” Menendez said.
Iran’s “breakout” time is defined as how long it would take it to produce fissile material for one nuclear weapon if it decided to build such weapons. Tehran denies any military objectives in its nuclear program, saying the work is solely for peaceful applications, such electricity generation.
