Iran open to higher level talks with world powers

UNITED NATIONS — Iran’s foreign minister said Thursday his nation is willing to raise and extend its dialogue on a wide variety of issues to a “summit” level with world powers.

Manouchehr Mottaki told reporters that Iran went into talks Thursday near Geneva with the United States and five other world powers with “a clear agenda and a plan of action.”

“And we have entered into these discussions with this clear agenda, and this dialogue can also be enhanced, both in form and the level of discussions,” he said in Farsi, speaking through a translator at a news conference at U.N. headquarters in New York.

“So, different committees can be formed and they can cover various topics in the discussions and they can be put in the agenda,” he said. “And from the point of the level of discussions … the Islamic Republic of Iran has the readiness to enhance the level of such talks up to the level of a summit meeting.”

Mottaki said Iran was willing to discuss a variety of security, economic and political issues that Iran has defined although he did not specifically refer to discussions on nuclear issues which are the key topic in the negotiations near Geneva.

The five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council — the U.S., Russia, China, Britain and France — plus Germany hope to persuade Tehran to freeze a program that could create nuclear weapons.

Negotiators also held the highest-level direct U.S.-Iran talks in three decades. The two nations lack formal relations.

Going into Thursday’s talks, one of the top U.S. goals was to get the Iranians to commit to a second round of talks to be held within a couple of weeks in order to keep the dialogue in a compact timeframe. The U.S. assumption was that if Iran was willing to engage seriously on the nuclear issue, a positive sign would be its agreement to have a second meeting shortly.