Kayhan’s chief editor: US in Qatar no different from the one in Vienna

In an opinion piece and referring to the nuclear talks in the Qatari capital, Hossein Shariatmadari wrote, “America is never after fully removing the [anti-Iran] sanctions. It has realized, on the other hand, that this time, it is facing a rival that will not be giving actual concessions in return for mere pledges.”

“Now the question is: What’s the US pursuing in the Qatar talks, given the two abovementioned issues?” he wrote.

“One speculation that seems closer to the reality is that America needs the negotiations themselves and not their results, which would be achieved after consultations and agreements between the two sides,” Shariatmadari added.

According to the veteran journalist, the US and its European partners need “futile negotiations” to make Iran grapple with the “detrimental consequences, such as conditional prices of gold and foreign currencies, chaos in prices [of other things] and scores of more such fluctuations in our country’s economy.”

“America in Qatar is the same as the one in Vienna,” he warned.

Shariatmadari said the proposal for the Qatar talks was put forward at a time when the US and its European allies were having trouble in their attempts to enforce their own sanctions on Iran, while the Iranian negotiating team kept insisting on the country’s red lines, thus placing the Westerners in a fragile situation.

The Qatar talks, he added, was devised to help the US get out of the deadlock in the face of Iran’s steadfastness in the pursuit of its demands.