Iran International
As nuclear talks between Washington and Tehran edge forward, two former US officials warned the process is approaching a critical juncture—one that Iran may exploit to either extract deep concessions or run out the clock.
The gap between what the United States seeks and what Iran is willing to accept may simply be too wide to bridge, warned Christopher Ford, who served as Assistant Secretary for International Security and Nonproliferation during the Trump administration’s first term.
His remarks came at a panel hosted by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, as momentum appears to be building toward renewed talks between Washington and Tehran over Iran’s nuclear program.
Ford voiced deep skepticism about the direction of the negotiations and suggested Iran’s strategy may be to delay any meaningful outcome until after October, when UN Resolution 2231 is set to expire—removing the legal basis for snapback sanctions.
“If I were on the Iranian side, that would be my negotiating strategy piece number one: draw this out,” he said.
The panel, titled From JCPOA to TBD: Assessing the Prospects for Diplomacy with Iran, followed the abrupt cancellation of a separate virtual session that was to feature Iran’s Foreign Minister, Abbas Araghchi.
Araghchi had been added to the speaker lineup on Saturday for Carnegie’s high-profile Nuclear Policy Conference. But on the morning of the event, the think tank announced the session had been canceled after the Iranian delegation allegedly demanded last-minute changes that would have barred both the moderator and audience from asking questions.
Ford pointed to the incident as a revealing example of how Iran approaches diplomacy.
“Carnegie has gotten a bit of a flavor of the Iranian negotiating style in the past 24 hours,” Ford said. “The disingenuous bait-and-switch kind of thing. He knew what he was doing, and I commend you all for standing, you know, sticking to your guns on this.”
Richard Nephew, who helped craft US sanctions against Iran during the Obama administration and is now at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, echoed Ford’s concerns and called Iran’s current approach opportunistic.
“If you're Abbas Araghchi, you have to be trying to see what you can get and see whether or not you can get a concessional deal that puts you in a better position,” said Nephew, a former US negotiator.
He argued that Iran is probing for sanctions relief with minimal nuclear concessions—and may be encouraged by internal divisions within the Trump administration over whether a deal should be hardline or more flexible.
“Their actual entry point is to see what they can get… They get sanctions relief with fairly minimal nuclear concessions.”
Nephew added that public comments from US officials suggest openness to a significantly looser agreement.
“I think if you look at the plain text reading of what the president and what Witkoff have said, one can read into that a much looser, much, much softer deal,” he said.
While expressing doubt that a lasting agreement is within reach, Nephew suggested that a short-term deal could still help stabilize the situation if it limits nuclear activity and includes robust IAEA oversight.
Both experts portrayed the current moment as one of fragile, uncertain diplomacy—with high stakes and little room for error.
The director of exploration at the National Iranian Oil Company said earlier this month that offshore oil and gas exploration in Iranian waters will resume after a six-year halt.
"For the first time in five years, we’ve signed a contract for an offshore exploration rig," Mohiyeddin Jafari said, according to the oil ministry's news website Shana. "We hope to begin operations in shared maritime border zones by 2025."
The announcement came as Saudi Arabia announced the discovery of 14 oil and gas fields and the UAE signed a $1.6 billion offshore exploration deal.
Jafari cited a “shortage of rigs” as the reason for the suspension of offshore oil and gas exploration.
However, reports from OPEC and Iran’s Ministry of Petroleum indicate that the number of drilling rigs in the country has remained stable over the past years, hovering around 160 units, with about 20 of them dedicated to offshore drilling.
Nonetheless, it remains unclear how many of Iran’s drilling rigs—most of which were built by Western companies decades ago—are still operational. In 2020, Reuters reported that Iran was struggling to obtain spare parts for Western-made rigs, and that a quarter of its drilling platforms were out of service, with many others operating only partially.
That same year, the state-run IRNA news agency quoted oil officials as saying that 85% of Iranian rigs required repairs and parts replacement.
Another major challenge for Iran is the lack of financial resources. The Iranian Parliament’s Research Center previously reported that annual investment in the country’s upstream oil and gas sector (exploration and production) has halved following US sanctions imposed in 2018, dropping to around $3 billion, compared to the previous years.
For comparison on a larger scale, annual investment was around $19 billion in the 2000s during the peak of Western companies’ involvement in Iran’s oil and gas projects.
Exploration and drilling costs are significantly higher offshore than onshore and given the government's financial constraints, developing offshore fields has not been a priority.
Caspian Sea
Iran is the only Caspian littoral state with no offshore oil or gas production, and Iran’s only seismic vessel in the Caspian Sea, named Pajvak, was destroyed in a fire in 2005.
The country’s only offshore drilling platform in the Caspian, named Amirkabir, was moved to Iran’s Caspian coast a decade ago for maintenance and remains inactive, just a few kilometers from shore. As such, the discovery of new gas fields in the Caspian waters appears impossible for Iran.
Ilham Shaban, head of the Caspian Oil Studies Center in Azerbaijan, told Iran International that last year Azerbaijan produced 580,000 barrels per day (bpd), Kazakhstan 350,000 bpd, Turkmenistan and Russia both than 100,000 bpd from their respective offshore Caspian fields.
Azerbaijan also produced around 50 billion cubic meters of gas from the Caspian Sea, half of which was exported—mainly to Europe. Russia produces annually 1.5 bcm gas from the Caspian fields.
Meanwhile, Arab countries south of Iran have increasingly participated in developing the Caspian offshore projects of the three Turkic states. Over the past two decades, the UAE’s Dragon Oil has invested $10 billion in Turkmenistan’s offshore sector and extended its investment agreement until 2035.
In 2023, Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC) purchased a 30% stake in the Absheron gas field—Caspian’s second-largest offshore gas field—in Azerbaijani waters, becoming a partner with France’s TotalEnergies in the project.
Just last month, Kazakhstan’s national oil company KazMunayGas officially invited ADNOC to invest in its offshore fields.
Southern waters of Iran
Unlike the Caspian Sea, where Iran has no joint fields with neighbors, all of Iran’s southern neighbors share offshore oil and gas fields with Iran. Not only do they produce several times more than Iran, but they are also rapidly developing these joint projects.
Iran currently extracts only 35,000 bpd from the joint Forouzan (Marjan) field with Saudi Arabia. In contrast, Saudi Arabia produces 18 times more than Iran from this field and has signed contracts worth $12 billion with foreign companies to increase daily oil output to 800,000 barrels and gas production to 70 million cubic meters within the next four years.
Another joint field between Iran and Saudi Arabia is Farzad (Hasbah), from which Iran has no production. Saudi Arabia began producing 30 million cubic meters of gas daily from this field in 2013 and plans to increase it to 75 million cubic meters in coming years.
Saudi Arabia and Kuwait also share two other fields with Iran: Esfandiar (Lulu) and Arash (Dorra). They have already developed the former and signed agreements to develop the latter. While Iran claims a share in these fields, both Arab nations have rejected that claim.
Moreover, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait have developed two more shared fields—Khafji and Wafra—with a combined production capacity of 500,000 bpd over the past decade. The mentioned fields are not joint with Iran.
Iran and the United Arab Emirates share the Salman and Nosrat fields. Each country produces around 50,000 bpd from Salman, but the UAE extracts 20 times more than Iran from Nosrat—about 65,000 bpd.
Iran also shares the Hengam field with Oman, with both countries producing around 10,000 bpd each.
However, the most important offshore field for Iran is South Pars—the largest gas field in the world—which it shares with Qatar. Qatar began gas production from the field a decade earlier than Iran and has so far extracted 2.5 times more gas than Iran from what it calls the North Dome.
While the Iranian portion of the field entered its second half of life last year—meaning production will decline by 10 billion cubic meters each year—Qatar has signed $29 billion in new contracts with international companies to boost its gas production from the field by 65% by the end of this decade.
Elected in 2013, the Argentine-born pontiff entered the Vatican just as Hassan Rouhani, a relative moderate within Iran’s ruling establishment, rose to power. Their political overlap raised hopes of better ties.
Rouhani visited the Vatican in January 2016, meeting Pope Francis behind closed doors. According to Vatican readouts, the Pope welcomed Iran’s nuclear deal with world powers and urged its leaders to help defeat terrorism and extremism in the region.
Despite maintaining diplomatic relations, Francis never visited Iran, even as he made rare and symbolic trips to nearby Muslim-majority states. In 2021, he traveled to Iraq, where he held an unprecedented meeting with Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani in Najaf, which Iran’s state broadcaster ignored entirely.
Tensions between the progress ideals of the Vatican under Francis and Tehran’s actions sharpened after the death of Mahsa Jina Amini in morality police custody in 2022 sparked the nationwide "Woman, Life, Freedom" protests.
Francis condemned the use of the death penalty on demonstrators during his annual address to the Vatican diplomatic corps in January 2022.
"The death penalty cannot be employed for a purported state justice, since it does not constitute a deterrent nor render justice to victims but only fuels the thirst for vengeance."
Weeks earlier, during his Christmas Day address, he called for reconciliation in Iran, grouping it with other regions experiencing conflict. He prayed for a lasting truce in Yemen and for reconciliation in Myanmar and Iran, highlighting the need for peace and dialogue there.
Francis also responded to escalating regional tensions. After the US killing of Qassem Soleimani in 2020 and Iran’s retaliatory strikes in Iraq, he called for restraint and dialogue, warning against war’s destructive toll.
“I call on all sides to keep the flame of dialogue and self-restraint alight and ward off the shadow of hostility,” he said in his annual State of the World address to diplomats in January 2020.
Even as he criticized Iran’s human rights record, Francis remained a point of contact for Iranian leaders. In November 2023, late President Ebrahim Raisi spoke with the Pope by phone, expressing appreciation for his call for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza following Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel.
Francis repeated that plea during his final Easter address, delivered weeks before his death.
