‘US needs to give confidence to Iran as they withdraw from nuclear deal’

ANKARA

The United States needs to give confidence to Iran on nuclear deal as it was the part that left the deal, the Iranian foreign minister said Saturday.

“We complied with our commitments until the US withdrew, and even one year after the US withdrawal. The US did not comply, so the party that needs to give us confidence is the United States,” said Javad Zarif, speaking at the Antalya Diplomacy Forum hosted by the Turkish Foreign Ministry.

Zarif said, in the talks of the US return to the 2015 nuclear agreement, also known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), there is still a remaining stumbling block between the US and Iran which is recognition.

The problem is that the US has to come to the recognition that it was the United States that left the deal with an objective, and that objective was not achieved, now it is coming back to the deal, so it cannot dictate the objectives that it could not achieve on the negotiating table, said Zarif.

“I think that's, that's a cognitive transformation that the US administration needs to make, and I think we are getting there but not there yet,” he added.

Zarif said new President of the US Joe Biden has understood that his predecessor Donald Trump’s policy on Iran has failed.

“But still he wants to use that policy as leverage. And that's where the cognitive problem comes in. So, I think they have to abandon the fact that sanctions are an asset, sanctions are liability, sanctions are illegal, sanctions are unlawful,” he said.

“Unfortunately, the Europeans have been forced into basically succumbing to US sanctions, but it doesn't mean that they approve it, it doesn't mean that they accepted. The US was isolated,” he added.

When asked whether he trusted Biden or not, Zarif said “in diplomacy, nobody trusts anybody.”

The JCPOA is an agreement on the Iranian nuclear program reached in Vienna on July 14, 2015, between Iran and the five permanent members of the UN Security Council -- China, France, Russia, the UK, and the US -- plus Germany together with the European Union.

On the recent Iranian presidential elections, Zarif said: “Many of us were surprised, many of us were disappointed, but at the end of the day, today, Mr. (Ebrahim) Raeisi is the president of all Iran and we have to respect the electoral procedure.”

“From now on, every one of us will have to work in a way, whether we disagreed with him or whether we agreed with him. Whether we liked his policies or whether we disliked his policies he is now elected by the people in an election,” he added.

Iran's judiciary chief and the top conservative candidate, Ebrahim Raeisi, looks all but certain to romp home victorious in the country's presidential election.

According to the preliminary vote count of the 28.6 million votes cast, Raeisi was leading with 17.8 million, followed by Mohsen Rezaei with 3.3 million, Abdolnasser Hemmati with 2.4 million, and Ghazizadeh Hashemi with 1 million votes, according to the Interior Ministry on Saturday.