11th hour hurdles for Iran nuclear deal
LAUSANNE, Switzerland -- Secretary of State John Kerry, along with negotiators from six countries, were racing Monday morning to try and complete a nuclear deal with Iran.
CBS News correspondent Margaret Brennan reports all the world powers were in Switzerland and pressuring Iran to take the U.S.-brokered deal.
Secretary Kerry cancelled plans to return home for a previous engagement in order to continue the marathon talks.
The negotiators face a self-imposed deadline to reach an agreement by Tuesday, and Brennan says their task only grew more difficult over the weekend.
As U.S. negotiators raced toward the finish line, a skeptical congress was nipping at their heels.
House Speaker John Boehner threatened new sanctions against Iran regardless of the outcome.
"Frankly, we should have kept the sanctions in place so that we could've gotten to a real agreement and... the sanctions are going to come, and they're going to come quick," he said Sunday.
Boehner's Senate counterpart Mitch McConnell was in Israel, where Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the deal being brokered would only embolden Iran.
"Will this make their move forward more moderate or will it make it more extreme? I think it is a no brainer," said Netanyahu. "This is happening before our eyes and I think the most important thing is to make sure that Iran doesn't get a path to the bomb."
Negotiators in Lausanne say any agreement would prevent Iran from getting an atomic weapon for at least 15 years.
But major sticking points in the negations remained unresolved the day before the deadline:
Iran wants the sanctions that have cut them off from global markets lifted immediately -- the U.S. worries that would free Iran up to purchase parts that could be used to build a weapon.
And, Iran is demanding that it be allowed to further enrich uranium in the final years of a deal, but the U.S. is pushing back against that idea.
Negotiators likened the remaining hurdles to summiting a mountain peak; the final few feet are the toughest.
And Brennan says there appears to be some backsliding: Iran is refusing to ship its enriched uranium stockpile out of the country, which was part of a larger deal.
U.S. diplomats say it's not a deal-breaker as there are plenty of alternatives, but it does show these decisions will go down to the wire.
The U.S. threat of force is the leverage underpinning the negotiations in Lausanne, yet few diplomats believe an armed confrontation with Iran would be imminent even if the diplomats in Switzerland fail to reach an agreement by the end-of-March deadline, says Brennan.
"If you look at something like military action, you know the president has said all options are on the table, but who wants at this point to undertake another military action in a region that is already on fire in so many places, who wants to sign the U.S. up for that?" State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf told CBS News. "I don't hear a lot of people saying that."
The more likely consequence, says Brennan, is another round of punishing financial sanctions against Iran. The trump card Tehran holds is that it could decide to use that pressure as an excuse to charge ahead with the nuclear development the U.S. believes it has put on hold for the duration of these talks.
The current agreement -- part of the Joint Plan of Action agreed to by the P5+1 and Iran in 2013 -- is scheduled to expire in June. That gives negotiators a bit of breathing room to decide what's next if they miss Tuesday's deadline.