Officials from the United States and Iran will meet in Switzerland on February 17 for a second round of talks aimed at reaching an agreement to limit Tehran's nuclear program and avoid war.
The sides held indirect talks earlier this month in Oman, for the first time since key Iranian nuclear facilities were bombed by Israel and the United States during a brief conflict in June last year.
Tuesday's talks will take place at a time of a major buildup of US military forces in the Middle East.
Tensions have risen following massive nationwide protests in Iran last month, during which authorities carried out a brutal crackdown that, according to human rights groups, left thousands dead.
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi will hold talks in Geneva with White House special envoy Steve Witkoff and US President Donald Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner, while Omani representatives will act as mediators.
"I am in Geneva with concrete ideas to reach a fair and equitable agreement. What is not on the table: submission in the face of threats," Araqchi wrote on the X platform on February 16, as he arrived for talks with the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Rafael Grossi.
Tehran has said it is willing to accept restrictions on its nuclear program in exchange for relief from severe US economic sanctions, but will not give up its right to enrich uranium.
Washington has sought to expand the scope of the talks to include restrictions on Iran's ballistic missile program and an end to Tehran's support for armed groups in the Middle East. But Iran considers these issues unacceptable for discussion.
The United States and Iran will have to overcome deep mistrust and hostility to reach an agreement.
Another obstacle is the increasing political costs of an agreement for both sides.
"Today, any positive concession to the Islamic Republic would essentially mean rewarding a regime that in recent weeks has killed several thousand Iranians," Farda Ali Vaez, director of the Iran Project at the Brussels-based organization International Crisis Group, told Radio Farda.
For Iran, "reaching an agreement with a president who has not only carried out military attacks against Iran's nuclear facilities, but has also threatened military intervention in the country's internal affairs, is difficult," he said.
Experts say negotiating a new comprehensive nuclear deal will be extremely difficult.
To avoid war, according to Vaez, "the only viable short-term path is a largely symbolic understanding that buys time and potentially creates better conditions for more detailed and technical negotiations in the future."
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, speaking in Slovakia on February 15, said that Trump "has made it clear that he prefers diplomacy and achieving results through negotiations."
"We are dealing with people who are making political and geopolitical decisions based on pure theology, and that is a complicated issue," Rubio added.
The negotiations in Geneva come after repeated threats by Trump of military action against Tehran, first for its brutal crackdown on protests and then over the country's nuclear program.
Western countries have long suspected that Iran aims to develop nuclear weapons, while Tehran insists its program has only civilian purposes.
World powers reached a historic nuclear deal with Tehran in 2015 to prevent Iran from building a bomb. Western economic sanctions were eased at the time, but Iran began to backtrack after Donald Trump, in his first term as US president, withdrew from the deal in 2018 and reimposed sanctions.
On February 13, the US president said that regime change in Iran would be "the best thing that could happen."
He also confirmed that another aircraft carrier, the USS Gerald R. Ford, would soon join a "massive" American force in the Arabian Sea./Radio Free Europe
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