DUBAI, Aug 31 – Iran needs stronger guarantees from Washington to revive the 2015 nuclear deal, its foreign minister said in Moscow on Wednesday, adding that the U.N. nuclear watchdog should drop its “politically motivated investigations” into the nuclear work of Tehran. .
After 16 months of indirect talks between Tehran and Washington, EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said on August 8 that the EU had made a final offer to break the impasse to revive the deal.
Iran’s top diplomat Hossein Amirabdollahian said Tehran was carefully scrutinizing Washington’s response to the text handed to Iran by the EU last week as the coordinator of nuclear talks.
“Iran is carefully reviewing the text proposed by the EU… We need stronger guarantees from the other side to have a sustainable deal,” Amirabdollahian said at a joint news conference with his Russian counterpart in Moscow.
Amirabdollahian did not comment on “stronger guarantees”, but during months of talks with Washington in Vienna, Tehran has sought assurances from the US that no future US president will leave the deal, as former US President Donald Trump did in 2018.
President Joe Biden cannot provide such ironclad assurances because the deal is more of a political agreement than a legally binding treaty.
White House national security spokesman John Kirby said he had not seen the Iranian foreign minister’s comments.
“So I don’t know what guarantees they’re talking about,” Kirby told reporters. The United States is awaiting a response from the EU and Iran.
“While we are, as I said earlier, cautiously optimistic, we are also pragmatic and astute and recognize that there are still gaps, and we are trying to close those gaps in good faith, negotiating through appropriate channels and not through the public,” Kirby added.
The man who matters in Iran’s nuclear dispute with the West, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has not commented on the nuclear talks in public for months.
It was the bite of US, EU and UN sanctions over Tehran’s nuclear program that prompted Khamenei to tentatively endorse a 2015 pact between Tehran and major powers that curbed the country’s nuclear program in exchange for the lifting of sanctions.
But three years later, Trump left the pact and reimposed tough sanctions on Iran, prompting Tehran to violate the pact’s nuclear limits, such as restoring its stockpile of enriched uranium, refining it to higher fission purity and installing advanced centrifuges to speed up production.
“If Washington pulls out of the deal again, it will be a huge embarrassment for the supreme leader,” a former Iranian official said. “That’s one of the reasons why Tehran is insisting on this issue.”
The nuclear deal appeared close to recovery in March. But indirect talks between Tehran and Washington have since broken down over several issues, including Tehran’s insistence that the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) shut down its probes into traces of uranium found at three undeclared sites before the nuclear pact is restored.
“The agency should close this case… Such politically motivated demands are unacceptable to Iran,” Amirabdollahian said.
Tehran’s demand risks damaging efforts to save the pact. An Iranian official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told Reuters that closing the IAEA investigation was “the red line of the supreme leader.”
Kirby said U.S. officials believe the sides are now closer than they have been in recent months, “in large part because Iran has been willing to drop some of its demands that were completely unrelated to the deal.”