VIENNA (Dispatches) -- A senior Iranian diplomat has reflected on a warning recently issued by Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei about the West’s intention to use the 2015 nuclear deal to enable interference in the country’s affairs.
Kazem Gharibabadi, Iran’s permanent ambassador to Vienna-based international organizations, made the remarks in an interview published on Ayatollah Khamenei’s official website, Khamenei.ir.
He referred to the warning issued by Ayatollah Khamenei on Wednesday, during the Leader’s last meeting with the outgoing Iranian administration’s officials.
The Leader said the West was trying to advance a provision in the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran that could pave the way for its meddling in the Islamic Republic’s affairs.
The West alleges that the so-called provision “guarantees the JCPOA’s nuclear non-proliferation” goals and also mandates certain “trust-building measures” among the Persian Gulf region’s countries, Gharibabadi said.
This is while there is no need for either, the envoy said. The nuclear deal has its own timetables that ensure implementation of its purposes, he said, adding the other demand runs strictly counter to the talks’ agenda too.
Therefore, the Iranian side roundly rejected the proposal since this insistence “showed that they still consider the nuclear agreement to be a bridge enabling their interference in irrelevant issues such as Iran’s missile work and its regional affairs,” noted the diplomat.
“The purpose they seek through this is to start addressing these issues and consider them to be indivisible parts of the nuclear deal, and lay the groundwork for their interference in these areas,” Gharibabadi wrote.
Thus, wherever the Western side stopped short of its goals, it would be able to start blaming Iran and begin trying to put it under more pressure, he cautioned.
The official echoed the Leader’s remarks that such insistence on the part of the Americans had come while they, themselves, had

“refused to retrace even one step towards reversing their adversarial stance concerning Iran.”
Among many other things, the diplomat said, they conditioned the lifting of some of the sanctions and the removal of Iran’s Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) from their so-called blacklist on Iran’s resigning itself to the provision.
Neither did they agree to recognize an overdue end to an embargo on sales of conventional weapons to Iran, nor approve of lifting their bans on more than 500 Iranian natural and artificial persons, the envoy also underscored.
Gharibabadi went on to delineate Iran’s counter-approach in the face of the West’s attempted inroads.
He said that during the whole time while the West had been either violating its commitments to the deal or trying to bring Iran under new pressure, the positions adopted by the country’s Islamic establishment and a law ratified by the parliament mandating further remedial nuclear steps on the part of the Islamic Republic had, in turn, improved the country’s standing in the talks.
Now, faced with the West’s new pressure tactics, the country would try, on the one hand, to guard its improved standing, and advance its interests on the other, Gharibabadi said.