Iran urges Europe to save deal
Events of 65 years ago leading to hardening attitude to renegotiation
TEHERAN — Iran said on Monday that Europe should accelerate its efforts to salvage a 2015 nuclear deal between Teheran and major powers that was abandoned by US President Donald Trump in May, Iranian state TV reported.
“Europeans and other signatories of the deal (China and Russia) have been trying to save the deal, ... but the process has been slow. It should be accelerated,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Bahram Qasemi told a weekly news conference broadcast live on state TV.
“Iran relies mainly on its own capabilities to overcome America’s new sanctions.”
European states have been scrambling to ensure Iran gets enough economic benefits to persuade it to stay in the deal since US withdrawal from the deal, which Trump said was “deeply flawed”.
To understand how Iran views the US after Trump pulled Washington out of the nuclear deal, one needs to look first at the past.
More specifically, 65 years ago this week.
Then, a 1953 US-backed coup toppled Iran’s elected prime minister and cemented the rule of the US-backed shah, lighting the fuse for the 1979 Islamic Revolution. For years after, authorities sought to eliminate the memory of prime minister Mohammad Mossadegh, whose downfall at the hands of the West linked directly back to his nationalization of vast British oil interests in Iran.
Now, however, more officials across Iran’s political spectrum are re-evaluating and invoking Mossadegh’s stand as they oppose Trump. That reflects a hardening attitude to any possible renegotiation, returning to a decadesold belief that the US can’t be trusted.
“The Americans did not understand the issue. It was not just about the oil nationalization only,” said Abdollah Anvar, 94, who witnessed the 1953 coup as a young schoolteacher. “The issue was the humiliation and discrimination by Britain against the Iranian people.”
“The US became Britain’s heir to Iran after the coup,” he added.
The deal saw Iran limit its enrichment of uranium in exchange for the lifting of economic sanctions. It stopped Iran from being able to have enough highly enriched uranium for a nuclear bomb, opening the door for future talks.
Trump pulled the US out of the deal in May, and later tweeted he’d negotiate without conditions with Iran.
That drew a response from Iranian President Hassan Rouhani in August.
“I have no preconditions” for negotiating with Washington “if the US government is ready to negotiate about paying compensation to the Iranian nation from 1953 until now,” Rouhani said. “The US owes the Iranian nation for its intervention in Iran.”
Working group
On Sunday, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif also invoked Mossadegh on Twitter when mentioning a new US State Department working group on Iran.
“The US overthrew the popularly elected democratic government of Dr. Mossadegh, restoring the dictatorship & subjugating Iranians for the next 25 years,” Zarif said. “Now an ‘Action Group’ dreams of doing the same through pressure, misinformation & demagoguery. Never again.”
US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Thursday named senior policy adviser Brian Hook as special representative for Iran in charge of the Iran Action Group to coordinate Trump’s pressure campaign against the Islamic Republic.
In March, Iranian authorities named a street for Mossadegh in a neighborhood in northern Teheran.
Zohreh Abedi, a postgraduate student in law in Teheran, passed by the street recently. He stressed that negotiations between Iran and the West remained important.
“We need to talk. Trump should not be distant, (otherwise) it will damage both the US and the world,” Abedi said.