President Biden must “compensate” the regime in Tehran for former President Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw from the 2015 Iran nuclear accord in order to rehabilitate the pact, according to a senior Iranian diplomat.
“The onus is on the offending party to return, restart, and compensate for the damages as well as to reassure that they would not renege again,” Iranian Ambassador Esmaeil Baghaei Hamaneh, Tehran’s top representative to the United Nations in Geneva, told the U.N. Conference on Disarmament on Wednesday.
That message broadcast a maximalist position from Tehran despite public gestures from U.S. officials last week. Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s team aimed to jump-start negotiations by waiving the sanctions renewed by Trump in exchange for Iran’s return to compliance with the deal’s nuclear restrictions.
“It doesn’t help us to posture from this podium,” State Department spokesman Ned Price said on Wednesday when asked about the Iranian envoy’s statement. “We certainly know there is posturing going on elsewhere.”
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Trump’s team withdrew from the deal and restored U.S. sanctions in a bid to force Iran to agree to additional curbs on its nuclear program and roll back other forms of aggression. Iranian officials have taken a series of steps to ramp up their nuclear program, most recently going so far as to suspend its compliance not only with the nuclear deal but the Additional Protocol — a measure related to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty at the foundation of all arms control efforts.
Those disputes provided a political backdrop for a new warning from U.N. nuclear watchdogs who detected “undeclared nuclear material” at a secret site.
“The agency is deeply concerned that undeclared nuclear material may have been present at this undeclared location and that such nuclear material remains unreported by Iran under its safeguards agreement,” the International Atomic Energy Agency reported on Tuesday.
A trio of Western European powers known as the E3 — France, Germany, and the United Kingdom, which joined the United States in agreeing to the 2015 nuclear deal, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action — condemned Iran’s decision “to suspend the Additional Protocol and the transparency measures” contemplated by the pact.
“The E3 are united in underlining the dangerous nature of this decision,” the three European governments said on Tuesday. “It will significantly constrain the IAEA’s access to sites and to safeguards-relevant information.”
Blinken’s team is also “concerned” about Iran’s latest flouting of the IAEA, but Price put more of an emphasis on the fact that the country hasn’t completely gutted the transparency measures.
“We note the announcement that Iran will continue to implement its obligations under its Comprehensive Safeguards Agreements with the IAEA fully and without limitation and that the IAEA and Iran have reached a temporary bilateral technical understanding regarding verification and monitoring activities,” Price said on Monday.
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Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, for his part, pledged on Monday to “raise compensation” in any direct talks with the U.S, “whether those compensations will take the form of reparation or whether they take the form of investment or whether they take the form of measures to prevent a repeat of what Trump did.”
