The Obama administration celebrated the one-year anniversary of its six-nation nuclear deal with Iran on Thursday.
“Iran has implemented its nuclear-related commitments, as verified by the International Atomic Energy Agency,” President Obama said in a statement. “As a result, all of Iran’s pathways to a nuclear weapon remain closed.”
The agreement between Iran and China, France, Germany, Russia, the U.K. and the U.S. “demonstrates what can be achieved by principled diplomacy and a sustained commitment to stopping the spread of nuclear weapons,” Obama added. “America’s willingness to engage directly with Iran opened the door to talks, which led to the international unity and sustained engagement that culminated in the” agreement.
Secretary of State John Kerry, along with several of his counterparts, marked the occasion in remarks from Paris.
A year later, “a program that so many people said will not work, a program that people said is absolutely doomed to see cheating and be broken and will make the world more dangerous, has, in fact, made the world safer, lived up to its expectations, and thus far produced an ability to be able to create a peaceful nuclear program with Iran living up to its part of this bargain and obligation,” Kerry said.
The “world is safer today because conflict in the region is not calculated on the basis of the potential of a nuclear confrontation or nuclear explosion, and because we have the ability to be able to work through some issues which we’ve seen, for instance with our sailors who stumbled into Iranian waters and within 24 hours we were able to get them out,” Kerry said referring to Iran’s brief detainment of U.S. sailors in January.
“That could not have happened prior to this agreement having taken place.”
Kerry also said that opening the lines of communication with Tehran after isolating it for decades can lead to progress in other areas but that the nuclear agreement was not supposed to be a panacea.
“Nobody pretends that some of the challenges we have with Iran have somehow been wiped away,” he said. “This program was about a nuclear track and about a nuclear program. It was not about the other issues that are involved in the relationships of a number of nations in the region and the United States.”
The deal has been criticized by some U.S. allies and Republicans for not reining in Iran’s ballistic missile program, stemming its aggression toward Israel, stopping its support for terrorist groups or blocking its meddling in regional conflicts.
