 For more videos on people's struggles, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. The seventh round of talks to revive the JCPOA or the Iran nuclear deal concluded recently and the eighth round is expected to start soon. There have been mixed evaluations of the progress of the talks. While there have been some advances on reaching a common draft text for further discussions, threats so far by the US and Israel have initiated the atmosphere. A key sticking point has been Iran's demand for sanctions relief which it sees as essential for the deal to be revived. However, the US which withdrew from the deal in 2018 has failed to give any ironclad guarantees on this. What is the state of the Vienna talks? What are the positions of the various sides and the concerns raised by them? Rania Khalik of Breakthrough News explains. So the seventh round of talks in Vienna between the US and all the other partners in Iran about restoring the nuclear deal are at somewhat of a standstill and that's largely because of the behavior of the United States. US officials and media have of course repeatedly blamed the Iranians for a failure to return to the nuclear deal. But of course it's important to remember that it was the US that unilaterally withdrew from this deal in 2018. And during the seventh round of negotiations to restore the deal, the US added new sanctions on Iran. And US officials, both current and former, urged Joe Biden to restore Iran's fear through basically more militarism. And this is all happening as the Israelis are continuing to threaten war. And throughout these talks, they were lobbying the United States to essentially leave the military option on the table and to not relent on the issue of sanctions. Now the major problem that is obstructing a return to this deal is that the US and the Europeans are trying to go back to the JCPOA, the nuclear deal, but they're trying to do it while maintaining the sanctions, the maximum pressure sanctions that are currently crippling Iran. Now Iran maintains that all of these sanctions imposed since 2018 when the US unilaterally pulled out of the deal that all of these sanctions must be lifted, whereas the US wants to keep in place many of these sanctions under the guise of human rights and anti-terrorism. And I'm talking about both sanctions that were imposed under Donald Trump, but also new sanctions that have been imposed under the Biden administration. So the US essentially wants to have it both ways. And a lot of this is to appease the Israelis who are concerned that without these sanctions on Iran, Iran won't be weak anymore, would naturally become a more powerful player in the region. So the Israelis basically want the US to continue to cripple Iran's economy so that Iran can be held lower on the sort of like power relations in the region. And I should add that in addition to the sanctions that have been imposed on Iran and continue to be enforced against Iran, Iran has also been facing years of what can be considered really a secret war, covert war, that includes sabotage, covert attacks and assassinations of their scientists by the Israelis as well as what can only be considered piracy by the US, where the US is actually commandeering ships that have Iranian oil on them and is actually taking that oil and then selling it and making money off of Iranian oil. So there has been this ongoing escalating covert war taking place in the backdrop of all of this. And I mean, as far as the Iranians see it, it doesn't really feel to them that there's much difference between this administration under Joe Biden and the Trump administration. Joe Biden came to power and appointed these sort of non-ideological pragmatists to senior positions and most importantly, assigning Robert Malley to the role of restoring the Iranian nuclear deal, which was a positive sign. And Joe Biden also campaigned on restoring the nuclear deal. But in practice, the Iranians don't feel any difference between the Trump administration and the Biden administration because so far, the Biden administration has continued to enforce Trump's maximum pressure campaign. And like I mentioned, added new sanctions while also trying to squeeze even more concessions out of the Iranians. So when it comes to these current negotiations, the US isn't just okay with going back to the original nuclear deal as was negotiated under Obama, but they're also adding new demands. They're trying to go after Iran's regional policies and Iran's missile systems, which weren't related at all to the previous nuclear deal. And again, much of that goes to really appeasing the Israelis. And the last thing I'll add on this is that the Iranians are also in a position of they have the Americans and the Europeans demanding all these new concessions while also continuing these sanctions that are in violation not only of the nuclear deal, but also in violation of international law because they're unilateral sanctions while crushing the Iranian economy. And this is after it was the US that left the deal while the Iranians actually abided by the deal for a year completely abided by it after the US unilaterally withdrew. And then it was only after a year of nothing changing that the Iranians started to say, okay, well, there's no reason for us to continue to abide by all of these various measures if the US isn't going to have to do it. So the Iranians kind of slowly started to go outside of the bounds of the deal, not completely, but slowly just because they didn't feel a need to abide by something that the US wasn't abiding by. And then, you know, one of the other major sticking points here that is preventing the Iranians from feeling like there's any sort of good faith negotiations with the US is that the Biden administration has made it explicitly clear that even if they reenter a new deal with the Iranians that the next administration, the next US administration, which could very well be a Republican administration, they can't guarantee that that next administration will abide by the deal. So in a way, it's kind of like why are the Iranians, why would they enter a deal with the US if the US is literally telling them that there's no guarantee in two or three years when there's another administration that this deal will be maintained. It can just be broken again.