Iran’s top diplomat accused President Trump over the weekend of trying to get Iran to withdraw from their nuclear agreement.
“The U.S. objective is Iran’s withdrawal from the nuclear deal and this does not mean that we will never withdraw from the nuclear deal; the U.S. is isolated in quest for this goal,” Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif said Sunday, according to the semi-official FARS outlet.
Zarif’s stated aversion to exiting the pact, which he negotiated with former President Barack Obama’s administration, is in tension with Iran’s repeated threats to walk away if European allies acquiesce to Trump’s policy preferences. Zarif warned against the failure of the deal, even as his diplomatic team issued demands to European powers in the midst of negotiations to salvage the agreement.
“Any package and proposal which is due to be presented to Iran and then come under decision by the country should be a package which is also accepted by Russia and China,” Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Bahram Qassemi said Monday.
Russia and China — like the European Union, France, Germany, and the United Kingdom — are signatories to the nuclear deal, known formally as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. Both have shown a marked willingness to oppose U.S. interests around the world; one Democratic lawmaker believes Russia and Iran “collaborated all during the negotiations” over the agreement. So Qassemi’s invocation of the two U.S. adversaries is designed to strengthen the Iranian position against the Western powers.
“That a special circle inside the U.S. provides the country’s officials with wrong information is aimed at ratcheting up psychological warfare,” he said.
But Iran is in a weaker position than those comments imply, Zarif acknowledged. “We can talk the deal up or talk it down,” he said at the same event Sunday, per a U.S.-backed outlet. “But we should know that a failure of the deal will have very dangerous consequences for us.”
