Miliband meets Iran’s Araghchi for first UK-Iran talks in a year

UK Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband met Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi in New York on Thursday, the first meeting between UK and Iranian ministers in a year and the first since Britain in July proscribed the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) as a terrorist organisation, a designation that worsened relations between the two countries.

The meeting, one of an exhaustive round of bilaterals undertaken by the Iranian foreign minister at the margins of the UN General Assembly, came as Mohsen Rezaei, the secretary of Iran’s supreme national security council and a recently promoted hardliner, said Washington had been given four to five days to respond to Iran’s conditions for reopening the Strait of Hormuz.

Rezaei specified the apparent deadline in a Wednesday evening television interview. He said Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian and Araghchi had flown to New York to convey Iran’s internally agreed terms, “not to negotiate new ones.” “There has been no discussion whatsoever that these conditions should change, that a new condition should be removed or added,” Rezaei said.

Rezaei said the seven conditions must be implemented “completely and all at once.” If the United States did “not fulfil the conditions, we will neither open the strait of Hormuz nor is there any negotiation on the table,” he said. The apparent shift in Iran’s posture, he added, was that Tehran now insists Washington act first. “Talk is enough. Negotiations are enough. Now we must act,” Rezaei said. He did not specify what Iran would do if the deadline passed without US compliance.

The seven conditions were set out earlier in the week to US special envoy Steve Witkoff by Araghchi at talks on the General Assembly’s sidelines, with Araghchi speaking largely through a Qatari mediator. The conditions include the lifting of US sanctions and an end to war on all fronts, a reference by Iranian officials to Israeli military activity in south Lebanon.

In his meeting with Araghchi, Miliband made clear that the UK was committed to freedom of navigation in the strait and wanted a diplomatic solution, also stressing UK support for Saudi Arabia, a UK ally in Yemen. He warned Iran about its behaviour in the UK, including threats to Jewish communities, and called for the UK to be given consular access to the British couple sentenced to 10 years’ imprisonment in Tehran.

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio also said it would be wrong to characterise the Witkoff talks with Iran as a major breakthrough, and European diplomats have not sensed a US-Iran breakthrough in New York.

Some IRGC officers have linked the Strait of Hormuz dispute to the closure of the Bab al-Mandab strait, the narrow waterway close to south-west Yemen now under the control of Iranian-backed Houthis. Maj Gen Rahim Safavi, a senior Iranian military figure, said: “If the Americans start a new war, a new front centred on the Red Sea and the Bab al-Mandab strait may open before their eyes. Are they ready to enter the battle on this front? This is a question that they should pay more attention to.”

Pezeshkian’s address to the UN General Assembly on Wednesday was deemed a success overall, balancing a refusal to bend the knee to “the US bully” with a willingness to seek diplomatic talks. He also proposed a new security architecture for the future in partnership with Gulf states, including those Iran has been bombarding in an effort to dislodge the US from its military bases.

Maj Gen Ahmad Vahidi, commander-in-chief of the IRGC, praised Pezeshkian’s speech, saying: “We are not afraid of war. It is the loud and firm call of the Iranian nation – a call that resonated from the United Nations podium, through the words of the esteemed president, and reached the ears of the world.”

Brent crude was trading at about $107 (£81) a barrel on Thursday. A faction inside Iran was arguing that Tehran should seek to escalate the conflict with a vulnerable US president, rather than let the crisis drift in its current deadlock.