Grossi visits Iran, only after Trump's election in first visit since new Iranian president

UN nuclear watchdog chief Rafael Grossi visited Iran on Wednesday for the first time since President Masoud Pezeshkian was elected in July. The visit, however, came later than he had hoped.

On September 9, after an IAEA Board of Governors meeting on Iran’s nuclear program, Grossi said that he hoped to meet with Pezeshkian in the very near future – and in any case, prior to US election day on November 5.

Grossi was hoping to make progress with Pezeshkian and set some positive progress points on the ground – in case Donald Trump was elected president – with expectations that a new Trump era would make diplomacy harder for Grossi and others.

During his first term, Trump pulled the US out of the 2015 JCPOA nuclear deal with Iran, carried out a maximum pressure sanctions and psychological warfare campaign against Tehran, supported Israeli operations against it, and had the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) Quds Force chief Qasem Soleimani assassinated in 2020.

“I am far from being able to tell the international community... what is happening. I would be in a very difficult position. So it’s like they (Iran) have to help us – to help them, to a certain extent,” Grossi told Reuters on Tuesday on the sidelines of the COP29 climate summit in Baku.

Grossi also told CNN on Wednesday, “We are in a moment of particular tension. They have a lot of nuclear material... They do not have a nuclear weapon at this point. And we have to negotiate.”

Despite all of this, it seems Iran did not want to meet before it knew who would be the next inhabitant of the White House.

This all comes just days before the upcoming IAEA board meeting on November 18-22.

After Pezeshkian's rise to power

IN SEPTEMBER, Grossi noted that since Pezeshkian’s inauguration on July 30, there has been no progress whatsoever with Iran, despite public statements some officials made about trying to improve the situation with the West.

Grossi said, “There has been no progress in the past 15 months towards implementing the joint statement of March 4, 2023,” in which Tehran had promised to start to fix a number of its nuclear violations and work on its lack of cooperation with the UN nuclear watchdog.

He added, “It has been more than three and a half years since Iran stopped implementing its nuclear-related commitments under the JCPOA, including provisionally applying its additional protocol.

“Therefore, it has also been over three and a half years since the agency was able to conduct complementary access in Iran. Consequently, the agency has lost continuity of knowledge about the production and inventory of centrifuges, rotors and bellows, heavy water, and uranium ore concentrate,” Grossi said.

Moreover, the IAEA chief added, “Iran says it has declared all nuclear material, activities, and locations required under its NPT safeguard agreements. However, this statement is inconsistent with the agency’s findings of uranium particles of anthropogenic origin at undeclared locations in Iran.

Grossi said, “The agency needs to know the current location(s) of the nuclear material and/or of contaminated equipment involved.”

This concerns the extensive evidence of Iranian nuclear violations which the Mossad exposed when it raided Tehran’s nuclear archives in 2018.

Grossi also highlighted that Iran continues to increase its 20% and 60% enriched uranium stock as well as the number of cascades it has for enriching uranium – all in violation of the 2015 nuclear deal.