Alghadeer TV Alghadeer TV
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken has warned Iran that it will become “very hard” to return to the 2015 nuclear agreement if negotiations in Vienna on a potential revival of the multilateral deal continue without progress.
Speaking to reporters in Paris on Friday, Blinken said Washington still has “serious differences” with Tehran despite months of diplomatic efforts in the Austrian capital to resurrect the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).
“There will come a point, yes, where it will be very hard to return back to the standards set by the [deal],” he said. “We haven’t reached that point – I can’t put a date on it – but it’s something that we’re conscious of.”
If Iran “continues to spin ever more sophisticated centrifuges” and steps up uranium enrichment, it will bring nearer the “breakout” time, he added.
Since April, envoys from Iran and the P4+1 group of countries have been engaged in the Vienna talks aimed at returning the US to compliance.
An American delegation is also in Vienna, but it is not attending the discussions because the United States is not a party to the nuclear deal.
Former US President Donald Trump abandoned the deal in May 2018 and re-imposed the anti-Iran sanctions that the JCPOA had lifted. He also placed additional sanctions on Iran under other pretexts not related to the nuclear case as part of the “maximum pressure” campaign.
Following a year of strategic patience, Iran resorted to its legal rights stipulated in Article 26 of the JCPOA, which grants a party the right to suspend its contractual commitments in case of non-compliance by other signatories and let go of some of the restrictions imposed on its nuclear energy program.
Now, the new US administration, under President Joe Biden, says it wants to compensate for Trump’s mistake and rejoin the deal, but it is showing an overriding propensity for maintaining some of the sanctions as a tool of pressure.
Tehran insists that all sanctions should first be removed in a verifiable manner before the Islamic Republic reverses its remedial measures.
Elsewhere in his remarks, Blinken said that Biden still supports a return to the JCPOA, noting, “We have a national interest in trying to put the nuclear problem back in the box that it was in the [deal].”
At the press conference alongside Blinken, French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian claimed that the responsibility now lies with Iran.
“We expect the Iranian authorities to make the final decisions — no doubt difficult ones — which will allow the negotiations to be concluded,” he said.
In response, Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesman, Saeed Khatibzadeh, said, “The opposing sides are the ones who must make the decisions.”
“The Islamic Republic of Iran had never left the JCPOA to return to it,” he added. “The United States and the Europeans know best that Iran made its decision when it remained in the deal and kept it alive despite the unilateral US withdrawal from JCPOA, the imposition of illegal and oppressive sanctions against the Iranian people, and Europe’s inaction.”
