Iran’s foreign minister said his nation’s vow not to seek nuclear weapons "never expires,” even as the Trump administration accused the Islamic Republic of violating the "spirit” of a 2015 accord easing sanctions.
"Iran
is committed to not producing nuclear weapons,” Foreign Minister
Mohammad Javad Zarif said Monday at the Council on Foreign Relations in
New York. "Nuclear weapons do not augment anybody’s security.”
Zarif’s
comments came as the Trump administration, facing a recurring deadline,
said Iran was complying with the accord, known as the Joint
Comprehensive Plan of Action. During his campaign, President Donald
Trump called it the "worst deal ever” and said he would tear it up. The
White House gets a chance to follow through on that promise every 90
days, when it’s required to certify to Congress whether Iran is meeting
its terms of the deal.
For the second time since Trump took office, the
administration determined that Iran was in compliance, according to
three officials who briefed reporters Monday night on the condition of
anonymity. But they said the U.S. would still seek to punish the country
for malevolent behavior outside of the nuclear pact, including its
support for Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria and its continuing
development of ballistic missiles.
In April, the first time the
Trump administration had to make a determination on the accord,
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said the agreement only delayed Iran’s
ambitions to gain weapons of mass destruction. He also said the accord
didn’t take into account Iran’s role in sponsoring terrorism and
destabilizing other countries.
"This deal represents the same failed approach of the past,”
Tillerson said at the time. "The Trump administration has no intention
of passing the buck to a future administration.”
U.S. allies in
Europe remain supportive of the pact, and many of the sanctions it
removed would require their participation to go back into effect, a move
seen as unlikely.
While the agreement allowed Iran to enrich and store some
uranium for energy production, it had to reduce uranium stockpiles by 96
percent, idle many enrichment centrifuges and pour concrete into its
heavy-water nuclear reactor. The Obama administration insisted the
provisions would slow the time it would take Iran to produce nuclear
weapons.
International Atomic Energy Agency reports verifying
Iran’s compliance with the agreement show the country was holding up its
part of the deal, Zarif said.
"That’s very clear in black and
white in the report of the IAEA, which is hardly a sympathizer of Iran,”
Zarif said. Instead, Tehran has argued that the U.S. hasn’t lived up to
its end of the bargain by pressing European allies not to do business
with Iran.
Permanent Ban
Opponents of the nuclear
agreement have called for renegotiating the accord with the goal of
making permanent its 15-year moratorium on uranium enrichment close to
the level needed to make a bomb.
Regardless of whether it sticks
with the JPCOA in the months and years ahead, the U.S. has the option of
imposing additional sanctions separate from the accord. In June the
Senate voted for new penalties on Iran, including designating its
Revolutionary Guards Corps a terrorist organization and imposing
sanctions on the country’s ballistic-missile program and other
activities.
If carried out, the move against the Revolutionary Guards would come with risks, Iran’s military warned.
"Counting
the Revolutionary Guards the same as terrorist groups and applying
similar sanctions to the Revolutionary Guards is a big risk for America
and its bases and forces deployed in the region,” Major General Mohammad
Baqeri, Iran’s armed forces chief of staff said at a gathering of
military commanders, the Tasnim newspaper reported.
The Senate
bill, S. 722, which was later merged with a Russia sanctions bill, has
so far stalled in the House over concerns from the energy industry that a
provision could block U.S. companies from lucrative foreign oil deals.
