Iran has announced its partial withdrawal from the nuclear deal signed with world powers in 2015, a year after Donald Trump pulled out of the agreement.
President Hassan Rouhani said Tehran will stop exporting enriched uranium stocks as stipulated by the 2015 agreement and warned it would resume higher uranium enrichment in 60 days if the remaining signatories did not make good on promises to shield its oil and banking sectors from sanctions.
Wednesday’s measures, announced by Rouhani in an address to the nation, were formally conveyed to ambassadors to countries remaining inside the deal – France, Britain, Germany, China and Russia. Foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif separately set out the technical and legal details in a letter to the EU foreign affairs chief Federica Mogherini.
Under the deal Iran is required to sell its surplus enriched uranium abroad, rather than keep it, thereby allowing Iran to generate nuclear power without building nuclear weapons.
Rouhani said Iran wanted to negotiate new terms with remaining partners in the deal, but warned that the situation was dire. “We felt that the nuclear deal needs a surgery and the painkiller pills of the last year have been ineffective … This surgery is for saving the deal, not destroying it.”
The move is bound to be seized upon by Washington as proof that the nuclear deal – which the US violated in May 2018 – has collapsed and is no longer worth pursuing.
EU officials were privately informed of the extent of Iran’s response at a meeting on Tuesday. On Tuesday night a French source warned that Europe would have no choice but to impose economic sanctions against Iran if it stepped back from the deal. “We don’t want that and we hope that the Iranians will not make this decision,” the source said.”
Rouhani has been under intense domestic political pressure to produce some kind of countermeasure following the US withdrawal.
Tehran has lost patience with Europe’s efforts to create a new viable financial mechanism that would allow European firms to continue trading items such as medicines and humanitarian goods with Iran and circumvent US secondary sanctions.
The Trump administration has repeatedly warned European multinationals they will face swingeing US Treasury fines if they trade with Iran and try to operate in the US market. Almost all large European firms have withdrawn from the Iranian market, depressing the economy still further.
Under its policy of “maximum pressure”, Washington has extended sweeping sanctions on Tehran and in recent weeks has hit even harder, moving to ban all countries from buying Iran’s oil, its top export, and declaring the Revolutionary Guards to be a terrorist group – the first such designation of a unit of a foreign government.
UN inspectors still say that Iran has remained in compliance with the nuclear deal, which is still backed by European powers as well as Democrats seeking to unseat Trump next year.
Iran will claim its announcement falls within sections 26 and 36 of the JCPOA, the deal signed in 2015, which allows Iran to take steps if one party withdraws from the agreement.
US secretary of state Mike Pompeo is bound to seize on Tehran’s move as a lever with which to prise Europe away from its support for the deal, which was seen as a high-water mark of European diplomacy. Pompeo is currently in Iraq on an unscheduled visit, where he has been warning about Iranian activity.
European diplomats are left to manage an often contradictory Washington foreign policy, but broadly fear that the US national security adviser John Bolton is pursuing a strategy of regime change in Iran that will only backfire, ushering in a more hardline stance.
The Kremlin said that Iran had been provoked into rolling back some of the terms of the deal due to external pressure which it blamed on the US. “President [Putin] has repeatedly spoken of the consequences of unthought-out steps regarding Iran and by that I mean the decision taken by Washington [to quit the deal]. Now we are seeing those consequences are starting to happen,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters.
Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu reiterated his country’s long-held position of not allowing Iran to obtain nuclear weaponry. “This morning, on my way here, I heard that Iran intends to pursue its nuclear programme,” Netanyahu said in a speech marking Israel’s Memorial Day. “We will not allow Iran to achieve nuclear weaponry. We will continue to fight those who would kill us.”
The Guardian
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