TEHRAN - Iranian Foreign Minister Hussein Amir-Abdollahian on Tuesday expressed the Islamic Republic’s readiness to negotiate last year’s draft agreement aimed at salvaging the 2015 nuclear deal, also known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), and removing illegal U.S. sanctions.
Amir-Abdollahian made the remark at a meeting of the Iranian Foreign Ministry’s senior officials with a group of university professors of political science and international relations in the capital Tehran.
Amir-Abdollahian underscored the current administration’s efforts to neutralize Western-led sanctions against the Islamic Republic while keeping the window open for negotiations to remove the illegal U.S. bans.
“Today, we are not at the point of reaching a temporary agreement, and what took place was the dignified reclamation of the Iranian nation’s assets in two phases from the United Kingdom and South Korea,” the top Iranian diplomat said, referring to the recent release of the Islamic Republic’s frozen funds in the two countries.
“The Islamic Republic of Iran is ready to negotiate the September draft document for the realization of the rights of the Iranian nation and the removal of sanctions, while maintaining its red lines,” he added.
But Iran has not stopped there and at the same time, it has seriously put the “neutralization of sanctions” on the agenda, he added.
Amir-Abdollahian also pointed to Iran’s growing cooperation with regional and international organizations, saying, “The membership of the Islamic Republic of Iran in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and BRICS is a big step that bespeaks the high status and capacities of the Islamic Republic among the world’s emerging economies.”
The United States, under former president Donald Trump, abandoned the JCPOA in May 2018 and reinstated inhuman sanctions that the agreement had lifted.
The talks to revive the 2015 deal kicked off in the Austrian capital city of Vienna in April 2021, with the intention of removing anti-Iran sanctions and examining the U.S. seriousness in rejoining the JCPOA.
The discussions, however, have been at a standstill since August 2022 due to Washington’s insistence
 on its hard-nosed position of not removing all the sanctions that were slapped on Tehran by the previous U.S. administration.
The European Union, which acts as the coordinator of the talks, forwarded at the time a fresh proposal to the Islamic Republic in order to break the impasse that had affected the negotiations due to American procrastination.
Iran submitted its response to the EU draft proposal on August 15, 2022, a week after the latest round of talks wrapped up in Vienna.
After submitting its response to the EU proposal, Tehran urged Washington to show “realism and flexibility” in order to reach an agreement. However, it took almost ten days for the Biden administration to submit its response to Iran’s comments on the EU draft.
Iran blamed the failure of JCPOA’s revival on the procrastination of the American side in providing an answer and said moving to the next stage would have been possible had the U.S. government shown serious willpower and acted responsibly in its promises.