Kerry: Iran nuke deal likely implemented in ‘coming days’

“And I think the outcome, which is the release of the sailors just hours after the president completed his address is a pretty powerful endorsement of that strategy”, he said. Worldwide sanctions relief will be triggered when Iran follows through on commitments to reduce its nuclear program. So, we continue to be concerned about this situation.

Kerry tells reporters that Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif informed him that the reactor core, or calandria, will be filled with concrete and destroyed in the coming hours. “At that point”, the senior State Department official said, “Foreign Minister Zarif said to the secretary that he had indications from the people who were holding our sailors that they would be free to go at dawn, that it was probably not safe for them to transit during the course of the night in dark”.

Yet at the same time, the administration claimed that the encounter wasn’t hostile and the sailors were treated well.

It was precisely because of that lack of trust between Iran and six world powers – China, France, Germany, Russia, the United Kingdom and US – that negotiations to reach a deal took more than two years. Stephens said the Navy’s priority now is “determining… how exactly these sailors found themselves in Iran”.

KELEMEN: And Royce says the Obama administration isn’t pushing back.

Prior to the talks, American diplomats had no relationships with their counterparts in Tehran and mostly relied on other countries to relay messages.

The US House Foreign Affairs committee had then slammed the Iranians for the detention saying that the Islamic Republic had “once again ignored global law by seizing sailors in waters outside their jurisdiction”. As for the most important challenger and effective actor with regard to Iran’s nuclear issue, that is, the United States, especially when it comes to cooperation between Iran and America for the implementation of JCPOA, this issue must be analyzed from the viewpoint of more serious USA interventions in Iran’s peripheral regions and the outcome of U.S. presidential elections in 2016.

The Tehran authorities have quickly accepted that the USA patrol boats strayed into their waters by accident.

The video also showed pictures of the sailors aboard one of their vessels after their capture, kneeling, with hands on their heads. Kerry is expected to be in Europe this weekend on other business. Senior administration officials said the vessels appeared to have experienced mechanical trouble or ran out of fuel, but Fars initially said the sailors had been “snooping”.

At the same time, the US has expanded outreach efforts to Iran.

Iran demanded an apology from the U.S. on Wednesday for the straying of the two navy patrol boats into Iranian waters, though it also released the men unharmed after interrogation.

The official said that in Kerry’s many conversations with Zarif, he focused on one main message: “If we were able to do this in the right way, we can make this into what will be a good story for both of us”.

Emergency diplomacy defused the latest crisis in the decades-long estrangement between Washington and Tehran, but it only deepened the raging domestic dispute over the White House’s engagement strategy.

But on Wednesday, Kerry pointed to the new lines of lines of communication opened with the Iranians as crucial in defusing the naval incident.