TEHRAN – Iran said on Saturday it will not negotiate forever after the U.S. said it is not ready to remove all sanctions on the Islamic Republic.
Washington is dragging its feet on removing sanctions despite having declared that it is ready to undo the wrongs of the former Trump administration which abandoned the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) in 2018.
Speaking to reporters in Paris on Friday, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Washington still has “serious differences” with Tehran despite months of diplomatic efforts in the Austrian capital to resurrect the nuclear agreement.
Iran is insisting that while it is against attritive negotiations, it is ready to wait as long as it takes before the U.S. remove all sanctions imposed, reimposed and relabeled by the former government in a verifiable manner.
“There will come a point, yes, where it will be very hard to return back to the standards set by the [deal],” Blinken said. “We haven’t reached that point – I can’t put a date on it – but it’s something that we’re conscious of.”
Since April, envoys from Iran and the P4+1 group of countries have been engaged in the Vienna talks aimed at returning the U.S. 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.
The new U.S. 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.
In his remarks, Blinken claimed that Biden still supports a return to the JCPOA. “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 take the final decisions — no doubt difficult ones — which will allow the negotiations to be concluded,” he said.
Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesman, Saeed Khatibzadeh, said, “The opposing sides are the ones who must take 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 U.S. withdrawal from JCPOA, the imposition of illegal and oppressive sanctions against the Iranian people and Europe’s inaction.”
On Saturday, Khatibzadeh tweeted, “Out of a steadfast commitment to salvage a deal that the U.S. sought to torpedo, Iran has been the most active party in Vienna, proposing most drafts.
“Still believes a deal is possible if the U.S. decides to abandon Trump’s failed policy,” he tweeted. “Iran will not negotiate forever,” he added.
On Friday, U.S. Special Envoy for Iran Robert Malley emphasized that Washington is not going to remove all of the Trump-era sanctions.
The Iranians “want all of the sanctions that President Trump’s administration reimposed or imposed since 2018 to be lifted. And that’s a lot. And we’ve said we’re prepared to remove those that we think we need to remove to be back in compliance with the JCPOA. But we’re not going to lift all of the sanctions that the Trump administration imposed,” he told National Public Radio (NPR), a Washington-based American media organization.
Asked whether the United States is prepared to walk away despite its desire to get back into this deal, he replied, “Yeah. I mean, we’re not - you know, we’re not desperate for a deal any more than we believe Iran is desperate for a deal. But we would walk away if the deal that Iran is prepared to accept is not one that we feel meets our bottom-line interests.”
A senior US official said Thursday Washington will not give Tehran assurances that a future U.S. administration would not withdraw from the Iran nuclear agreement again.
“There is no such thing as a guarantee, and I think Iran knows it and we know it,” the official told reporters during a press briefing.