LUXEMBOURG (Dispatches) -- The EU’s chief diplomat Federica Mogherini announced Monday she will visit Washington early next month to defend the Iran nuclear deal after U.S. President Donald Trump threatened to tear it up.
Mogherini said she would "be in Washington in early November” to urge U.S. lawmakers not to pull out of the landmark 2015 deal.
EU foreign ministers on Monday warned that the hardline stance on Tehran that Trump outlined in a belligerent speech on Friday undermined any chance of dialogue with North Korea over its nuclear weapons.
"Clearly the ministers are concerned about the fact that messages on the JCPOA (the Iran deal) might affect negatively the possibility of opening negotiations or opening even the space for negotiations with the DPRK,” Mogherini told reporters after the bloc’s 28 foreign ministers held talks in Luxembourg.
The leaders of France, Britain and Germany gave a rebuke Trump in a joint statement which said the deal remained "in our shared national security interest.”
Russia and China also voiced their support for the agreement.
UN inspectors have repeatedly certified that Iran is sticking to its technical requirements under the accord, but Trump has insisted that Tehran was not living up to the "spirit” of the deal.
A Russian deputy foreign minister said the nuclear deal with Iran is working "quite efficiently” and requires no amendment, dismissing calls by the United States to address "flaws” in the deal.
Sergei Ryabkov told Russian news agency TASS that there was an American saying that goes "If it’s not broke, don’t fix it.”
"That’s what I would like to address to the colleagues in the United States,” the Russian diplomat said.
The approach of calls for fixing the Iran deal "seems to be a wrong way to follow as the existing documents are working quite efficiently,” he said of the deal, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).
Iran is fully compliant with the deal, while the U.S. is not, Ryabkov said. "What is to be improved in this context is the implementation of the existing agreements by the U.S. side,” he added.
He also noted that by fully upholding their end of the bargain, the Iranians "have passed the ball to the U.S. side.”