President Trump’s expected withdrawal from the Iran nuclear agreement might not provoke the regime’s departure, President Hassan Rouhani said Monday.
"If we can get what we want from a deal without America, then Iran will continue to remain committed to the deal,” Rouhani said, per Iran Daily, a state-run media outlet. “What Iran wants is our interests to be guaranteed by its non-American signatories."
That’s an about-face from previous statements by Iranian officials, who threatened to jumpstart their nuclear program if Trump tried to tamper with the pact negotiated by former President Barack Obama’s administration. "It means that there is no deal left," Hamid Baeidinejad, Iranian ambassador to the United Kingdom, told CNN last week. "The consequence would be that Iran would in fact be ready to go back to the previous situation."
The statement might be a comfort to European allies who have balked at striking the kind of supplemental agreement that would convince Trump to stick with the deal, known formally as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action.
“What Iran wants is our interests to be guaranteed by its non-American signatories,” Rouhani said. “In that case, getting rid of America's mischievous presence will be fine for Iran.”
The other parties to the deal are the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Russia, China and the European Union. "We don't think there is any justifiable reason to pull out of this agreement, and we continue to make the case for it to our American friends," German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas said Monday.
Trump faces a May 12 deadline to waive or renew sanctions targeting the Central Bank of Iran, which Obama waived under the terms of the 2015 deal, although he said he will announce his decision Tuesday.
U.S. and European officials have been negotiating a prospective supplemental agreement that would toughen the western posture toward Iran’s nuclear weapons and ballistic missile program, but the talks have been caught on a persistent snag: The deal allows Iran to ramp up nuclear enrichment gradually.
Trump demanded automatic sanctions in the event that Iran developed the material to the point of being within one year of being able to build a nuclear bomb, but European allies regarded that as a violation of the deal, one likely to provoke Iran to leave the deal.
“The place where there is a departure between the American and European position right now is on the automaticity of the resumption of the sanctions in that scenario,” a national security expert familiar with the talks told the Washington Examiner in April. “The Americans want to legislate for this a hard snapback of sanctions when this determination is made. The Europeans would rather have no snap-back in place, so that they can talk about it ... on a case by case basis ... say 'what are they doing, does it merit all the sanctions coming back?’"
