Both the United States and the European Union announced through their spokespersons that they were "considering" a response to the so-called "final text" of an agreement to restore the 2015 Iran nuclear deal.
The relevant data immediately cast doubt on the possibility of a successful resolution of the negotiation process that has been going on intermittently for more than 17 months.
The European Union coordinator for those negotiations, Enrique Mora, presented the draft proposal last week with instructions for the United States and Iran to respond by Monday, and to indicate whether they would accept the agreement in its current form.
US officials responded immediately and publicly by saying the US was ready to implement the agreement based on EU proposals, but Tehran indicated its intention to review the draft and then respond with comments.
The response came, quite literally, at the last minute, as Iranian officials announced in advance that they would submit their comments at midnight on Monday, thus pushing the boundaries of the EU-imposed deadline.
Nabila Massrali, the European Union's spokeswoman for foreign affairs and security policy, specifically cautioned against misconstruing the timing, but other people familiar with the negotiation process have argued for weeks that the Iranian regime is following a deliberate strategy to extend the process as much as possible.
This explanation of the regime's actions is supported by the content of the Iranian regime's response.
Few details of that response were provided on Tuesday, either by the Western parties or by Iran itself, but it immediately became clear that it conveyed the expectation of additional talks.
This intention appears to ignore previous comments from EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell, who stated that all avenues for compromise had been exhausted in previous rounds of negotiations and that the current draft would not undergo further changes.
An anonymous European source with links to those negotiations even told reporters earlier this month, “We will not change a single word or add a single comma in the current draft."
But public statements by Iranian officials about Tehran's response to that draft indicate that the regime does not expect the European Union or the United States to actually abide by this commitment.
Indeed, a report by the state Islamic Republic News Agency boasted that the United States had already shown "verbal flexibility" on two of the three outstanding issues and that Iranian negotiators were demanding that similar flexibility be written into the actual text of the agreement.
Before delivering the Iranian regime's response, Reuters and other news outlets reported that three potential points of contention are: the continued investigation of the International Atomic Energy Agency into the possible military dimensions of Iran's nuclear activities; the question of whether this is in the long term and to what extent and whether it can guarantee adherence to the agreement; and, the status of the mullahs' guards.
According to media reports, the Iranian regime's response to the draft agreement did not refer to the regime's pre-existing demands to close the investigation as a precondition for re-implementation of the nuclear deal.
However, the European Union was open to this finding, indicating in its draft that it would not oppose closing the investigation as long as Iran had provided credible answers to outstanding questions about the source of the nuclear traces found by the International Atomic Energy Agency at the four sites that Tehran did not disclose.
On the surface, this appears to open the door to resolving this unique outstanding issue. But that door was always open while Tehran was credibly accused of refusing to go through it.
In June, the International Atomic Energy Agency's Board of Governors voted to formally condemn the Iranian regime for its refusal to cooperate in an investigation regarding the obstruction of agency inspectors.
Tehran has repeatedly insisted that it has already provided all relevant information, but experts believe that the only information that was made available is that which supports explanations of nuclear effects, which are not credible.
It is clear that issues related to the IAEA investigation will not be difficult to resolve if Tehran is seriously committed to cooperating with it.
This is ironic given that a senior adviser to the Iranian regime's negotiating team used the same language in an interview with Al Jazeera.
In addition to claiming that Iran's stated concerns are "not difficult to resolve," Mohammad Marandi described these fears as "based on past abuses by the United States and the European Union."
Regime officials argued that once such a response was given, an agreement could be accepted after an additional two or three days of negotiations.
"If the Americans and Europeans are able to satisfy the concerns of the Iranian lawyers and negotiators, it is over," Marandi said, adding that they "only need to make a small political decision."
Tehran has used the phrase many times amid many delays in the negotiation process, but now as then, the "small political decision" in question appears to be the decision to simply capitulate to Iran's demands.
So far, Western signatories have ruled out such a capitulation, and on Monday, US State Department spokesman Ned Price once again condemned Tehran for its "unacceptable demands" and emphasized that "what can be negotiated over the past 16 or 17 months has been negotiated."
Moreover, Price emphasized that the Iranian regime has continued to accelerate its nuclear activities in provocative directions, using a strategy that is in fact nuclear blackmail to enforce the lifting of financial sanctions without the associated bargaining.
“If Iran wants these sanctions to be lifted, it will have to change its basic behavior. It will need to change the dangerous activities that led to these sanctions in the first place,” he said.
But Iran will never "change its basic behavior," as long as the West's approach to the Iranian regime is submission, not firmness.
