Araz News: President Obama has warned that he would walk away from a deal on Iran’s nuclear programme if Tehran did not stick to an outline agreed in April.

Obama spoke minutes after foreign ministers meeting in Vienna gave themselves an extra week to conclude negotiations on what is intended to be a comprehensive and detailed agreement, after failing to clinch a deal by an end-of-June deadline.

The deal being negotiated in Vienna is supposed to be based on an outline agreed in Lausanne in April, but in his remarks the US president suggested that Iranian negotiators had called that framework into question.

“My instructions … have been clear. The framework agreement that was established in Lausanne is one that, if implemented effectively and codified properly would achieve my goal, which is Iran not obtaining a nuclear weapon,” Obama said.

“There has been a lot of talk from the other side, from the Iranian negotiators, over whether they can abide some of the terms that came up in Lausanne. If they cannot, that’s going to be a problem. Because I have said from the start I will walk away from the negotiations if it’s a bad deal.”

Iranian diplomats in Vienna insist they are upholding the Lausanne framework and that it is the US that is looking for changes, but they say a deal is within reach. The Iranian foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, returned to Vienna from a day of consultations in Tehran, but he denied he had been seeking a mandate for a deal from the country’s leadership.

“I already had a mandate to negotiate and I am here to get a final deal and I think we can,” Zarif said, pointing out that he had returned to the Austrian capital with the head of the Iranian Atomic Energy Organisation, Ali Akbar Salehi, despite the fact that Salehi is still recovering from abdominal surgery.

“Salehi’s presence despite his health problem shows Iran’s seriousness in the negotiations,” the foreign minister said. On his return Zarif held talks with the US secretary of state, John Kerry, and met his Russian and German counterparts, Sergei Lavrov and Frank-Walter Steinmeyer.

The negotiators are under pressure from the US Congress to conclude the long-running talks early in the month. A copy of a comprehensive agreement is due to be delivered to the legislature by 9 July. Failure to do so would trigger an extra delay, giving Congress two months to review the deal instead of one.

Kelsey Davenport, the director for nonproliferation policy at the Arms Control Association, said: “Additional time gives opponents of the deal space to undermine the agreement, and the stakes are too high to jeopardise the benefits of a good deal.”

Speaking to the Guardian in Tehran, Hossein-Amir Abdollahian, Iran’s deputy foreign minister for Arab and African affairs, said: “We are optimistic about the outcome of the negotiations and hope that the other parties will also act logically and reasonably. The time is not that important. It is the result that is significant. We should not allow time restrictions to damage a good deal.”

The negotiators in Tehran say that every word and punctuation mark is being scrutinised by experts from all parties to avoid leaving any loopholes in an agreement regulating Iran’s nuclear programme, potentially for a generation.

“[T]his is staggeringly consequential for everybody. Everybody who’s involved in this negotiation understands and quite frankly feels the burden of the responsibility of what we’re doing,” a senior US official said. “This is incredibly consequential for the national security of the United States. This is quite consequential for the national security of all of the [negotiating] partners, the regions, the Middle East, the world, and for Iran. And we have between the United States and Iran decades of enmity and mistrust. That’s very tough, and making this decision to actually do the joint comprehensive plan of action is a very, very, very big decision for everybody – very big. So it’s tough to do it.”

Abdollahian said that a good nuclear agreement could have an “influence” on other developments in the Middle East, where Iran would continue to play a “constructive role”, fighting Isis and supporting the governments of both Iraq and Syria. Its support for Hezbollah in Lebanon or opposition to the “illegitimate regime” of Israel would not change.

“Some are trying to create concern in the region about what will happen if there is a nuclear deal. They say that if the huge financial resources of Iran are released [when sanctions end] then Iran will have a stronger role in the region. But we are seeking our authentic role in establishing peace and stability.” Iran enjoys “spiritual influence” throughout the region, he said. “Unfortunately some consider our spiritual influence as interference, but this is a misguided approach.”

Reprinted from theguardian