Attempting to blunt the return of onerous global sanctions, the Islamic Republic is launching a round of talks with European, Chinese, and Russian officials.

Tehran’s deputy foreign ministers are expected to meet counterparts from Britain, France, and Germany at Istanbul on Friday, a spokesman for the Iranian foreign ministry said Monday. Separately, foreign ministers of the Islamic Republic, Communist China, and Russia will meet at Tehran Tuesday to coordinate strategy, and perhaps to plot ways to evade future sanctions. 

Last week officials at London, Paris, and Berlin, collectively known as the E-3, said that unless a new agreement is reached by the end of August they will reimpose all global sanctions that the United Nations Security Council levied before the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran.

“The Iranians dread snapback,” a veteran Israeli broadcaster in Farsi, Menashe Amir, tells the Sun. “The Tehran regime can run out of money, its reserves gone. It will exacerbate a crisis of high inflation rates, lack of water and food, and long interruption in the electricity supply. More of that could lead to major unrest in the country, and the regime fears it more than anything.”  

The snapback mechanism was built into the 2015 Security Council resolution that endorsed the Iran deal. It allows each party to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action — the five permanent members of the Security Council and Germany — to reimpose all sanctions that existed before the deal. Each can unilaterally void the resolution, automatically mandating wide economic sanctions and a ban on Iranian imports and exports of most types of weapons. 

Israeli officials are concerned that the Europeans “might fall into an Iranian trap,” Mr. Amir said. To rescind the snapback threat, he said, Tehran “could offer goodies, like a return of international inspection.” The regime expelled the International Atomic Energy Agency’s inspectors after the American-Israeli strikes on its nuclear sites in June.

Yet, Mr. Amir adds, “the Europeans are less trusting of the regime now than in the past, especially since Iran started selling drones to Russia,” so they might be more leery of Iranian offers of diplomatic “goodies.”

The Europeans “can capitalize on America’s and Israel’s military strikes against Tehran’s nuclear program by pushing for IAEA access and a pathway to dismantlement,” the director of the Iran program at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, Behnam Ben Taleblu, tells the Sun. Any delay in reimposing UN-mandated sanctions, though, “will only water down the West’s gains and put time on Tehran’s side,” he adds. 

The Security Council snapback option expires in October, and the Iranians are eager to delay its implementation. “If Europeans want to have a role, they should act responsibly, and put aside the worn-out policies of threat and pressure, including the ‘snapback,’ for which they lack absolutely any moral and legal ground,” Tehran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araqhchi, said last week.

For now, Iranian officials exclude the possibility of any negotiations with America, which has revoked the JCPOA and imposed onerous unilateral sanctions.

“If you don’t have the principal party in the room, the United States, that is the one that can deliver what the Iranians are looking for, which is sanctions relief, that sort of begs the question: What’s the point of this meeting?” the policy director at United Against Nuclear Iran, Jason Brodsky, tells the Sun. 

In 2020, European, Russian, and Chinese UN diplomats rejected Washington’s attempt to trigger the snapback mechanism, arguing that President Trump lost that privilege after America dropped out of the JCPOA. America then imposed strict sanctions unilaterally, including on Iran’s oil exports. Beijing has evaded the sanctions, buying subsidized Iranian oil clandestinely. 

In the trilateral meeting on Tuesday, the Islamic Republic’s allies might discuss ways to evade snapback-imposed sanctions as well. The Russian and Chinese “could refuse to abide by the restored UN Security Council resolutions,” Mr. Brodsky says. Yet, he adds, “there is a lot of mistrust and distrust between Russia and Iran and China.”

As a former Iranian ambassador to Moscow, Nematollah Izadi, put it over the weekend, “if Russia were to choose between supporting us or Israel, it would undoubtedly choose Israel.” Beijing, meanwhile, maintains strong ties with Gulf Arab countries that oppose the Islamic Republic, which it would not want to risk, Mr. Brodsky notes.  

Even if Moscow and Beijing evade the reimposed sanctions, they will have a major effect. “It’s more political and psychological for the Iranians than anything else,” Mr. Brodsky says.