U.S. lawmakers seek tighter Iran sanctions before any deal

U.S. lawmakers said on Sunday they aimed to tighten sanctions on Iran to prevent Washington giving away too much in a deal on Tehran’s nuclear program that diplomats said was still possible despite the failure of high-level weekend talks, Reuters reported on Tuesday.

According to the report, comments by Congressional hawks coincided with renewed lobbying from Israel against any nuclear deal with Iran.

Negotiators from world powers will resume talks with Iran in 10 days after failing late on Saturday to reach agreement on an initial proposal to ease international sanctions against Tehran in return for some restraints on its nuclear program.

The new talks will be at a lower level than the foreign ministers who gathered in Geneva at the weekend, but Britain and Russia both said the chances for a deal were fairly high.

The sides seemed on the verge of a breakthrough – before cracks materialized among U.S. and European allies as French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius dismissed the plans as a “fool’s game” of one-sided concessions.

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee will move ahead with additional sanctions this week to keep the pressure on Iran as talks continue, said Democratic Senator Bob Menendez, the committee’s Democratic chairman.

“My concern here is that we seem to want the deal almost more than the Iranians,” Menendez said on ABC’s “This Week.”

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, who joined the Geneva negotiations unexpectedly on Friday to help bridge differences, defended the administration’s position.

“We are not blind, and I don’t think we’re stupid,” he said on U.S. television. “I think we have a pretty strong sense of how to measure whether or not we are acting in the interests of our country and of the globe.”

Diplomats said France wanted any deal to require a shutdown of Iran’s Arak heavy-water reactor and the removal of Iran’s stockpile of higher-enriched uranium. Another stubborn issue was the extent and sequencing of relief from sanctions demanded by Tehran.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Sunday it was good that no deal with Iran was clinched at the weekend and that he had lobbied against scaling back sanctions by telling leaders: “What’s the rush?”

Promising to alleviate any concerns about Iran’s nuclear program, President Hassan Rouhani has opened diplomatic windows to a nuclear deal with Tehran.

Rouhani has repeated Iran’s long-time insistence on a right to sovereign nuclear energy for peaceful purposes as a signatory to the Non-Proliferation Treaty.