A working group comprising American and European officials will soon begin to develop a “side agreement” to the Iran nuclear deal aimed at easing President Trump’s complaints about the pact, according to Secretary of State Rex Tillerson.
“We will be discussing that through working groups beginning as early as next week and we’ll see what progress we can make,” Tillerson told reporters Monday in London.
Tillerson and other U.S. and European officials — particularly in France, Germany, and the United Kingdom, or the E3 — have limited time to come to an agreement before Trump reaches a deadline to renew sanctions on Iran that would violate the pact. The president says he will decline to waive the sanctions, absent a substantial toughening of the American posture towards the nuclear deal known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action.
“I think there’s a common view among the E3, certainly, that there are some areas of the JCPOA, or some areas of Iran’s behavior, that should be addressed,” Tillerson said. “And most particularly, their ballistic missile programs and our concerns over the expiry of the JCPOA and the provisions around the expiry.”
That’s a reference to the expiration of restrictions on the development of uranium and other nuclear-related programs, as well as the regime’s testing of ballistic missiles that might soon carry nuclear weapons.
“I’d say there was a pretty wide measure of agreement on the European side about the need to look at what Iran is doing on the ballistic missile front and to work out what we can do collectively to constrain that activity and to make a big difference there,” British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson said during the joint press conference. “And we think we can do that; we think we can do that together. But as Rex says, it’s important we do that in parallel and don’t vitiate the fundamentals of the Iran nuclear deal, and we’re sure we can do that.”
