Iran FM: If US wants new nuclear concessions, we do, too
Iran’s foreign minister rejected on Thursday any new negotiation with the United States over extending the length or conditions of the 2015 nuclear accord, saying that Iran would talk about changing the accord only if every concession it made — including giving up nuclear fuel — were reconsidered.
In an interview with The New York Times, Mohammad Javad Zarif said that would mean Iran would retake possession of the stockpile of nuclear fuel it shipped to Russia when the accord took effect.
“Are you prepared to return to us 10 tons of enriched uranium?” Zarif said of the relinquished stockpile — one of Iran’s concessions — about 98 percent of the country’s nuclear fuel holdings.
Under the agreement, Iran retains a limited amount of enriched uranium.
Zarif comments came a day after he conferred privately with counterparts from the six countries that negotiated the deal with Iran — Britain, China, France, Germany, Russia and the United States — on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly meetings in New York.
It was the first time Zarif had met with US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who has said the United States wants to “revisit” what he described as flaws in the accord even as he acknowledged Iran is abiding by its terms.
‘Ill-informed’ administration
Zarif, who negotiated details of the Iran accord with then US secretary of state John Kerry, dismissed the Trump administration as “seriously ill-informed” about the limits on Iran contained in the deal.
He described US President Donald Trump’s speech to the United Nations on Tuesday, in which he called the nuclear accord a one-sided embarrassment to the United States that he may abandon, as “absurd.”
What the administration really wanted, Zarif said, was to keep the Iranian concessions while trying to extract more from Iran — but with no new concessions from the United States or other parties.
That kind of position, he said, contradicted the premise of any negotiated deal.
“By definition, a deal is not perfect, because in any deal you have to give and take,” he said. “Otherwise you won’t have a deal.”
He further dismissed the idea of an addendum to the agreement to address the Trump administration’s objections, an idea that American officials say has been floated within the administration as a possible diplomatic way forward.
“Why should we discuss an addendum?” Zarif said. “If you want to have an addendum, there has to be an addendum on everything.”
Trump has strongly hinted he is prepared to “decertify” Iran’s compliance with the deal, even while Tillerson, speaking to reporters after his encounter with Zarif on Wednesday evening, acknowledged that Iran is in “technical compliance.”
Under an American law, a decertification would not terminate the deal, unless Congress voted to reimpose nuclearrelated economic sanctions against Iran — which would violate the terms of the accord.
Both Mr. Trump and Mr. Tillerson contend that Iran has violated the “spirit” of the nuclear accord by continuing to sponsor groups that the United States regards as terrorist organizations, supporting President Bashar al-assad in Syria and pursuing cyberattacks against its Arab neighbors and the United States.
‘Wrong signal’
Zarif said those complaints were all beyond the scope of the agreement struck in July of 2015, a position shared by other parties to the accord except the United States.
And the Iranian minister said that if the United States walked away from the accord, as Trump threatened, “Who would come and listen to you anymore?”
With such a threat, he said, “The United States is sending the wrong signal.”
Iranian officials seem to be betting that Trump, for all his criticism of the accord, will not blow it up. Washington has already run into resistance to any effort to reopen the terms, and Europeans have privately told the United States they will not reimpose nuclear sanctions on Iran even if the Americans do, undercutting any leverage Trump might hope to achieve.
Zarif said he was heartened that during a meeting of all the participants in the meeting on Wednesday evening at the United Nations Security Council, “everybody, with one exception, said this is a good deal.” The “one” was a clear reference to Tillerson.