Centrifugal forces: Iran nuclear talks resume

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Hello and welcome to the Intelligence from the Economist. I'm your host Jason Palmer. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. Apple used to be notorious for how difficult or risky it was for customers to repair its phones. All of a sudden, though, that's changing. We take a look at the right to repair movement and what to make of Apple's surprise move. And if there's a fire or a flood at a big museum and there's a chance to salvage. A few things which works come off the walls. Curators don't like to talk about them, but our correspondent digs into the tricky business of grab lists. First up, though, Talks on the Iran nuclear deal resumed yesterday in Vienna, the first time since hardliner Ebrahim Raisi became Iran's president. In the summer, Negotiators from Europe, China and Russia joined Iranian counterparts to find a path back to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or jcpoa, or to bash out a new deal. Not in the room are American negotiators. Iran hasn't spoken to them since then. President Donald Trump tore up the deal in 2018. The JCPOA put limits on Iran's nuclear enrichment program in exchange for the lifting of many economic sanctions. As those sanctions came back into force, Iran got right back to work. Enriching uranium edging ever closer to real weapons capability. In the meantime, the diplomacy hasn't gone anywhere. But after the first day of this week's negotiations, things were all smiles. Enrique Mora, Deputy Secretary general of the EU's foreign service, summed up the mood.

And there is clearly a will of the Iranian delegation to engage in serious work and bring GCPOE back to life. So I feel positive that we can be doing important things for the next weeks to come.

There's a glimmer of hope there, but there's also still a long way to go.

The first day of negotiations seemed to end on a positive note, which is actually pretty surprising. I mean, I think the mood going into these talks was pretty pessimistic.

Roger McShane is our middle east editor.

The administration of Joe Biden had thought it was close to restoring the JCPOA earlier this year. Then that mood changed with the election of Ebrahim Raisi, who's a hardliner. So I think people went into Vienna with pretty low expectations. And surprisingly, the first day has been rather positive.

In what sense? What's being kicked around?

Well, you're just hearing a lot of positive noises from people coming out of the talks, people smiling, people saying, we've made some progress. Now, look, who knows what that means? It's been one day of negotiations, and they're dealing with a lot of complicated stuff. I mean, you have a whole host of sanctions that America has heaped on Iran, essentially cutting it off from the world economy. Iran wants those undone. And then you have the progress that Iran has made with its nuclear program. I mean, it's been doing things like testing advanced centrifuges, hampering international inspections, and most importantly, increasing its stockpile of enriched uranium and well beyond the limits set in the original deal. And on top of that, it's enriching that uranium to 60% purity. And that's a level that's usually only reached by countries that want to make bombs. So, look, to put that all in the perspective of the jcpoa, that deal was meant to keep Iran always at least a year away from what they called breakout, the point where Iran had enough material for a bomb. Now, it's somewhere between a few weeks and a few months away.

And so what's actually being discussed in Vienna then? Just a return to the JPCOA as we understood it, or something new altogether?

Well, I mean, I think expectations are so low that America would be very happy to return to the jcpoa. Now, America is not directly involved in the talks. They're sort of on the sidelines, but they're getting their message across via the Europeans. One way to look at Iran's moves, its sort of advancements in its nuclear program, is as sort of a way to gain leverage in these talks. And while you get some Iranian officials who say they're not averse to returning to the old deal, most are talking pretty tough. They've demanded three main things from America. They wanted to admit wrongdoing in ditching the original deal. They wanted to immediately lift all sanctions on Iran, and they want America to guarantee that any new agreement will last beyond Joe Biden's term. In other words, that a future US President, a future Trump, won't pull America out. This could all be bluster. This could all be an attempt to drive a hard bargain in Vienna. But publicly, Iranian officials have shown little interest in returning to the old deal or even conducting the kind of detailed negotiations that might produce a new one. So the fact that everyone walked out of the meeting today and was looking sounding very positive, that's pretty surprising.

You've laid out what it is Iran would like from America, who's, it must be said, not in the room. What is America's stance at this stage?

Well, you know, the conditions laid out by Iran are impossible for America to meet. Start with the guarantee that the deal won't be ripped up by the next president. In order for that to happen, you'd need to turn the deal into a treaty which would require approval of two thirds of the Senate. And that's just not going to happen. Neither is America going to lift all of its sanctions on Iran because many of those sanctions have nothing to do with the nuclear program. They're related to Iran's sponsorship of terrorism. That's a non starter, but it sort of leaves the path forward unclear. Biden had hoped to simply sort of re enter the old deal before negotiating what he called a quote, unquote, longer and stronger deal. That also seems very unlikely at this point. And it's gotten to the point where America and its allies, most notably Israel, they're talking about Plan Bs, which is really just another word for sabotage and attacks on Iran's nuclear program.

You've spoken extensively of what Iran wants and where that fits in with what America wants. What about the rest of the international.

Community, the big European powers, Britain, France, Germany, who are all signatories to the original deal, they're working hard to get it restored and they tried to keep it alive, alive all these years after America pulled out. They're really the ones doing the hard work in Vienna. Then you have China and Russia, who are also signatories. They don't really have an interest in Iran gaining a nuclear weapon, but they probably don't mind watching America squirm a bit. They have their own interest in the Middle East. Many of Iran's neighbors in the Gulf, a lot of them oppose the original jcpoa. I think a lot of them have also now come around to it. But look, everyone knows that the real wild card in all this is Israel. It views Iran's nuclear program as an existential threat and it says it's going to feel free to act no matter what happens in Vienna. For the past few years, it's been engaging in a shadow war with Iran. It's killed its nuclear scientists. You have Israeli officials saying they've developed weapons such as bunker busting bombs that could penetrate the nuclear program. And then that would sort of obviate the need to rely on America to help out with any attacks. So look, Israel is basically saying we can act, we can act alone, and we might act alone if things keep moving in the wrong direction.

So the rhetoric kind of from all sides doesn't match all of those smiling faces coming out of the first day of talks. How to read what's going to happen.

For the rest of the talks?

I mean, I think before today you would have thought that a deal was very unlikely, or at least not an expansive deal. I think the best hope that a lot of people had was that some sort of interim deal could be reached, something that sort of froze Iran's nuclear program, froze its production of enriched uranium, and America would ease some of its sanctions in return. And the idea was sort of you'd buy time for broader negotiations. People sound positive today. Perhaps something more expansive is possible. But Joe Biden had hoped not only to jump back into the jcpoa, but to negotiate what was often called a more for more deal. This is that longer and stronger deal. And going into Vienna, it was looking like a less for less deal. Was this highest hope you could have. There's also the separate question of whether the JCPOA is even worth restoring. And this is something that American officials have talked about. For one thing, parts of it expire in 2025 and the whole thing ends in nine years time. Eventually, Iran's nuclear program will have made too many advances to safely return to the old deal. Rob Malley, America's chief negotiator, he's put it well when he says that you're not really dealing with a chronological clock that's ticking. It's a technological clock. And the point is that at some point Iran will have made advances that can't be reversed through not only the old deal, but any deal.

Roger, thank you very much for joining us.

My pleasure.

Just a reminder about the survey that we're running. Your chance to weigh in on the intelligence. Tell us what you think, good and bad@exterator.com intelligencesurvey just click the link that's in the notes for the today's show. Thanks. Not so long ago, I got a new iPhone. As I left the house just a few days later, I pulled it out of my pocket and dropped it. It made precisely one bounce on each of the steps outside my house before grinding to a halt in the street. I, I was furious at myself for being so clumsy, but also at the certainty it was going to be just about impossible to fix. That's by design. Apple is known for making it tricky for users or third party companies to do repairs on its flashy phones. But suddenly that's changing.

In a series of moves that I think surprised quite a lot of people, Apple said it would fix the software on its new iPhones to make them more repairable.

Tim Cross is the Economist's technology editor.

It would allow customers to fix their own phones and even provide manuals and tools and parts to help them do it. Something called the self service repair program.

And this is something that people have wanted the ability to do for a long time. Why is Apple doing this now?

Yeah, I think only Apple knows the answer to that for sure. But as you say, there's been years and years of sort of consumer and legal pressure on this that's coalesced around something called the sort of right to repair movement that basically says, look, if I've bought something, I should be able to fix it when it goes wrong. And you know Apple, and not just Apple, lots of other smartphone companies as well, kind of go out of their way. It seems to make this as hard as possible. So they do things like gluing the batteries in, using confusing screws that most people don't have the tools to remove and so on. And sometimes even go so far as to disable the phone if they detect that you've taken it to a third party repair shop. So it looks like finally the pressure against these sort of tactics has started to tell. And Apple said, okay, fine, we will let you guys fix the products that you've bought.

And so how does Apple's new deal work? It just simply stops doing those disabling.

Moves There's a bit more to it than that, although we don't know the details yet. Legally, the big change is that trying to fix things yourself won't void the phone's warranty, but you have to be trying to fix it. So some people like to tinker with the units of their phones that isn't covered, that will still sort of void your warranty. And some people are wondering how much of a U turn this really is, because, you know, it's potentially quite a nice source of money. If you can lock down a product such that only you can repair it, you then kind of have a captive market and can charge whatever you like. At the moment at least, the replacement parts that Apple do sell are not cheap. So you can get a new screen for one particular model of iPhone that costs about $270. So I think really we'll have to wait until this website goes live to see how much of a change of heart this really is.

And Apple isn't the only company that likes that kind of lock in, right? That kind of captured market.

No, it's not. Lots of phone companies do this. And, you know, part of it is because there's this sort of pressure on the industry to make things as thin and light as possible. The more you try and do that, the more you have to cram these components in together in ways that if you're not expert and don't have particularly dexterous fingers, make it quite hard to fix. You get some slightly more bogus sounding justifications as well. So one common one is safety. So Apple says it wants to make sure that consumers don't get hurt by breaking the glass from badly installed screens or whatever, which I think it's a stretch to think that anyone would hold Apple responsible for that. I've got a set of power tools in my shed and I'm only mildly competent at using them, but that doesn't stop people like Black and Decker from selling them to me. So that's always seemed like a slightly suspect justification. But it is interesting that the firm is in the midst of a pivot to services. If you can lock down your products in such a way that only you can fix them, then that's potentially quite a lucrative source of services revenue.

So in that sense it's kind of counterintuitive that Apple would be doing this now.

Is it just that that right to repair movement is really gathering steam?

This may have been done with at least one eye on these rules that are coming in all over the world and in America and Europe and Some of the other big markets that aim to reduce electronic waste, the idea is to make gadgets slightly less disposable so that we chuck fewer of them into landfills and so on. And obviously, the harder it is to repair a gadget, the more likely you are to throw it away when it breaks. So it may be that part of this is a sort preemptive attempt to comply with some of these rules that are coming down the pipe.

And regardless of the motivation, it does at last address that point of, especially if I'm going to pay the kinds of prices that Apple charges for its gizmos, that once I pay that money, it's mine to do with as I please.

I think this is really interesting and this is the sort of broader context in which I think we should see all this right to repair stuff, which is that a lot of the sort of computerized gadgets out there kind of mess with people's intuitive understanding of what it means to own things. The sort of penetration of computing and the Internet into more and more sort of consumer gizmos is really kind of muddying this idea. So consumers think they're buying goods. They think they're buying products in the way that they always used to, the way you buy a bag of carrots or a sack of nails or something. The companies increasingly think, aha, well, we can use the fact that we've got a permanent connection to this device and that it's a computer, so it can do lots of things. We can kind of keep a bit of control over the device and sell it as something closer to a service than it is to a product. And, you know, if you're a company that looks great because services mean recurring revenues, it means insights into what your customers are doing. It means all kinds of juicy data to crunch. So, you know, smart TVs, now, a lot of them report back to the owners on the programs that their users are watching. I think the problem comes when this isn't necessarily made clear up front. And it's new enough that the fact that it hasn't quite percolated out into sort of the general consciousness. So people buy things with a sort of goods model in mind, then find out later on that, oh, actually I bought a service and I'm actually kind of quite constrained in what I can do with this thing, and that causes ructions. So it may be that Apple has just decided that, you know, the friction from its customers butting up against these walls isn't worth the gain it gets from charging them to fix the phones.

And so do you think that apple, as the 800 pound gorilla in the tech room, will make a big difference? Will others follow suit, do you think? Is that notion of ownership kind of.

Heading back towards the olden ways?

I think it'll be interesting to see. I mean, at the moment, I would say no, it's not. Will Apple set the weather for other people? It might. I think if it doesn't, the other possibility is that one day something like this will end up in a court somewhere and that will set some kind of legal precedent and that will sort of force the industry to start thinking about what exactly are the rules and where exactly is the boundary between, you know, good and service and what should end users be able to do and what should they be reasonably prohibited from doing?

Thanks very much for joining us, Tim.

Thanks, Jason.

Ham house is a grand 17th century country pile in southwest London. And the fire alarm's just gone off. The house's massive gates swing open. Minutes later, fire engines start to appear. The historic house contains artifacts and artworks worth vast sums of money. Irreplaceable stuff. There isn't time to save all of the contents. So which will the firefighters choose? Thankfully, this is just a drill. But the question of what to save is a thorny issue for museums and historic buildings around the world.

Grab lists are the things you never want to use if you're the director of a museum.

Catherine Nixey is a Britain correspondent for the Economist.

Different people call them different things. Some people call them grab lists, other people call them priority lists, salvage lists, naturalists. Basically. They are the things that when the fire starts to burn or the floodwaters start to rise, or the terrorist bomb explodes, they're the things that you are taking out first. So you have to go through in your head and think, what are the works that this museum just cannot lose? And if you ask a curator, they'll say, we can't lose any of them. But typically, out of a museum that might have hundreds of thousands, even millions of objects, the British Museum's got 8 million. You're looking at saving 10, 20 items. It is not a lot.

So how do museums whittle everything down to these lists then?

Well, I mean, I think it's a very tough decision. I think they have a lot of arguments. I was talking to a director of the Guggenheim in Venice and she said it's like choosing between your children, you just can't do it. But, you know, just as parents have favourite children, apart from me, of course, museums have favorite objects and they have to pick them. And so they have different things that they weigh up when they're deciding what to take. And one way that they would say that they don't do, but of course they have to do, is to choose them by monetary value.

That seems reasonable enough, all things considered.

Well, it does. But museums like to pretend that they're not about money. Even though everything that they have is worth millions and in some cases, tens of millions of patterns. They hate putting price tags on objects. Museums. Partly this is for noble reasons, that a work of art is not just about sheer cash, and partly it's pragmatism. So many works are quite literally priceless. So if a Picasso goes up in flames, you can't use money to get another one, it is just gone.

So if money is not ostensibly at least the top of the list here, what are the factors that are used in making these lists?

Well, you have to think about cultural weight. Like, historically, is this item very important? Was it the shirt that Charles I was wearing when he was beheaded, or was it the pen that signed a peace treaty? And then you have to consider actual weight.

And the same for the second floor. Second floor's for later. That's what I.

So I went to a Ham House in Richmond, which is a National Trust house, and they were doing a grabless kind of exercise, where they set off the alarm. The fire brigade arrived and they were going to practice taking objects out of their building. Each firefighter at Ham House will be spoken to by a member of the National Trust and they will give them a sheet which is a grab sheet. It's a laminated sheet, and on it is a picture of the object that they are guessing that they have to retrieve from the house. And underneath it, it will say a few details about it, what it is, it will have a map of where it is and it will also have a line on it saying, wait. And next to that, it will have a pictogram of how many firefighters you need to get that object out. The whole house is max. When you've got historic building.

Any of the things.

Yeah, very, very quirky locks, things like that that we may not have access to, so we have to force entry.

Which is a really simple thing that they have to think about, is how big it is. So take Holbein's Ambassadors, for example. That's in the National Gallery in London. It's over two metres, just the painting from tip to toe. So you're not going to get that out the door. You can't get round corners, so you can't Kind of go out like a removal man, just carrying this painting.

And so is it the case that lots of museums, every museum has this kind of list, takes this kind of care, does this kind of practice?

It's not the case that every museum does this. The Smithsonian told me that they just wouldn't go through objects and decide what deserved to be saved after a disaster. They said that their buildings are secure and they don't have to engage in this kind of triage. And I put this idea that a museum might not burn down to Tom Conlon, who is at home house in Richmond, head of the Kingston fire station. And he told me why it's worth preparing for the worst.

What is?

If it's lost in this fire, it's lost to the world. It can't be replaced.

But so some of them have almost said, I can't possibly do it. I just can't do it.

Well, we look at Notre Dame, a magnificent building, and the fire that. That suffered. And, you know, from somebody who's been in this profession for 28 years, everything burns.

I also spoke to the director of the National Museum of Brazil, and he said six months into his tenure, the museum burnt down. On a Sunday evening, he stepped off a plane. He'd been away for the weekend, and that was it. Brazil's national museum, which had about 20 million objects in it, burnt down in a matter of hours. And almost all of those objects were lost.

Catherine, thank you very much for your time.

Thank you for having me.

That's all for this episode of the Intelligence. If you like us, leave us a rating and a review and you can subscribe to the economist@exterator.com intelligenceoffer. The links to subscribe and to take our survey are in the show Notes. See you back here tomorrow.