Zarif: US wants to gain concessions from Iran through coercion

Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said that the United States knows exactly what it takes to resolve its standoff with Iran, but still seeks to use pressure tactics to extract concessions from Tehran.

“They know exactly what it takes to go back to compliance, unless they are not serious about what they’re saying,” Zarif told the American journalism company, Politico, in an interview published on Wednesday.

A deadlock formed around the 2015 nuclear deal, officially known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), between Iran and others parties after the US left the agreement under former president Donald Trump in 2018 and returned the sanctions that the deal had lifted, Press TV wrote.

Iran continued to comply with the deal for a year after the US’s withdrawal, but then started some nuclear countermeasures that it gradually expanded as Washington and its allies in the pact would insist on their violations.

Tehran began its reprisal in line with the deal’s Paragraph 36 that allows any given party to retaliate for others’ non-compliance with the JCPOA.

Zarif noted that it only takes for Trump’s successor Joe Biden to issue a series of executive orders annulling his predecessor’s wrongful steps and palpably waive relevant congressional action for the US to return to the JCPOA.

However, “they want to use pressure and coercion in order to extract new concessions from Iran,” he noted.

“They want a new agreement, they want a wider agreement, they want something else, they want to talk about the sunset clause, they want to talk about [Iran’s] missiles, they want to talk about other issues,” the top diplomat stated.

This is while whatever warranted discussion was discussed during the talks that led to the agreement, he said.

“Now, why don’t we talk? The reason for not talking is that there is nothing to talk about.”

“I think the US continues to be in the policy review process,” Zarif said. “But if it is in the policy review process, it should not portray itself as having changed its policy, because it hasn’t,” Zarif said, adding, “What we see as US policy is exactly the same as the Trump administration; we haven't seen any change in policy.”

Joe Biden has only expressed a willingness to return Washington to the JCPOA, but has stopped short of taking any practical action that could reflect seriousness about the claim.

Iran has, meanwhile, continuously announced that it was only removal of the sanctions that could make Tehran stop implementing the JCPOA’s Paragraph 36, asserting that it never settles for a symbolic return by Washington to the deal.

Source: Iran Daily