TEHRAN -- Iran’s foreign minister said on Saturday that a U.S. move to allegedly restore sanctions waivers to Tehran was not enough and Washington should provide guarantees for the revival of the 2015 nuclear deal.
Washington on Friday claimed that it had restored the waivers to allow international nuclear cooperation projects, as talks on removing sanctions on Tehran enter the final stretch in Vienna.
“The removal of some sanctions can in itself translate into good faith,” Hussein Amir-Abdollahian said. “While what is on paper is good, it’s not enough,” he added.
Amir-Abdollahian said one of the major issues in the Vienna talks was getting “guarantees, especially from the West, to fulfill their obligations.”
“We demand guarantees in the political, legal and economic spheres. Certain agreements have already been reached,” he added.
The waivers restored by Washington had allowed Russian, Chinese and European companies to carry out non-proliferation work. They were rescinded by the United States in 2019 and 2020 under former President Donald Trump, who pulled out of the nuclear agreement in 2018.
Iran and remaining parties to the agreement have held eight rounds of talks in Vienna since April aimed at reinstating the pact which lifted sanctions against Tehran in exchange for restrictions on its nuclear program.
A year after Trump pulled the United States out of the deal and reimposed harsh sanctions, Iran gradually started scaling back its compliance under an article of the nuclear agreement which allows the parties to take countermeasures if their rights are not respected.
Ali Shamkhani, secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, said in a post on Twitter on Saturday: “Iran’s legal right to continue research and development and maintain its peaceful nuclear capabilities and achievements, side by side with its security against supported evils cannot be curbed by any agreement.”
“Real, effective and verifiable economic benefit for #Iran is a necessary condition for the formation of an agreement,” Shamkhani tweeted later in the day.
“The show of lifting sanctions is not considered constructive.”
Some reports interpreted the U.S. sanctions waiver as a show merely meant to ease pressure on Washington and launch a new blame game against Tehran.
On Friday, a group of U.S. House lawmakers asked Biden to focus on Iran’s ballistic-missile capabilities.
In a letter to the president, they accused his administration of failing to respond adequately to a spate of recent developments in Iran’s missile program.

The letter, which was led by Representative Joe Wilson, the chairman of the Republican Study Committee’s national-security task force, cited the test of satellite launch vehicles using new technology as particular reason for concern.
The group of Republican lawmakers said the Biden administration “has expressed concern” over the recent launches, which took place last year, and wrote that they could “potentially put U.S. allies in Europe as well as the U.S. homeland in range.”
“But concern and condemnations are insufficient. Action is needed,” the lawmakers wrote, also noting that the Iranian military launched 16 ballistic missiles during military exercises in December that they claimed overlapped with the talks in Vienna.
But the Biden administration has had to acknowledge that that it cannot focus on Iran’s missile defense capabilities because they are not covered by the nuclear agreement.
Late last month, Robert Malley, the chief U.S. negotiator, reiterated the administration’s position that the Iranian ballistic missiles “are not a subject of these negotiations”, but he boasted that “it is our objective to get at some point a discussion, a regional discussion that will deal with all these other issues.”
Iranian officials have strongly made it clear that the country will never negotiate about its defense capabilities.