Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said he would not negotiate with the new US presidential administration. The day before, the US President Donald Trump signed a document that renews "maximum pressure" on Iran to reduce Iranian oil exports to zero and prevent the country from obtaining nuclear weapons.
This is reported by Time, NYT.
Signing the document on Tuesday, February 4, Trump called it very tough, but also said he was open to a deal with Iran and expressed his willingness to negotiate with the Iranian leader.
On February 6, the US Treasury Department imposed sanctions on an international network that funnels revenues from the sale of Iranian oil to the Iranian military, circumventing existing restrictions.
On Friday, February 7, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said that negotiations with America “are not sensible, wise or honorable”. At the same time, he stopped short of ordering the Iranian government, which has been sending signals for months that it is interested in talks, not to engage with Washington.
“This is an experience we must learn from. We negotiated, we made concessions, we compromised, but we did not achieve the results we sought. And for all its shortcomings, the other side ultimately violated and destroyed the agreement
According to him, new negotiations will not solve any of Iranʼs problems.
As recently as November, Iranian officials were divided on whether Iran could withstand the additional economic pressure. According to one Iranian oil industry official, “the situation could become catastrophic”.
An Iranian diplomat said the country would withstand the US sanctions by deepening its partnership with the Asia-focused Shanghai Cooperation Organization and other alliances, but he said Iran could also step up its nuclear program or threaten oil facilities in the Middle East.
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has now dismissed fears that refusing to negotiate would further damage Iranʼs economy.
Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian told NBC News last week that he was willing to negotiate with the United States as long as they "respect our honor and wisdom and conduct themselves on equal terms".
Trumpʼs position on Iran
Last September, Trump said he was open to a new nuclear deal with Iran. At the time, Politico noted that Trumpʼs statements were an attempt to ease tensions with the Iranian government, a week after the Republican was told that Iran was plotting to assassinate him.
Trump did not go into details about future cooperation with Iran, but noted that negotiations are needed in any case — because of the threat posed by Iran with its desire to have nuclear weapons.
Iranian Foreign Minister Seyyed Abbas Araghchi said at the time that the country was open to discussing nuclear talks. At the same time, he noted that tensions in the Middle East could make it difficult to resume them.
After Trump won the US presidential election on November 8, The Wall Street Journal reported that he planned to sharply tighten sanctions on Iran and restrict the sale of its oil to stop Iran-backed violence in the Middle East. It also said that the US also wants to stop Iranʼs nuclear program in this way.
In an interview with CNN, Brian Hook, who oversaw Iran policy at the US State Department during Trumpʼs first term, said that the president has promised to "isolate Iran diplomatically and weaken it economically so that it cannot fund all the violence" committed by Hamas, Hezbollah
What preceded
The Iran nuclear deal was signed in 2015 by the US, UK, Russia, France, China, Germany and the EU. They agreed that the Iranian authorities would give up their nuclear program in exchange for the lifting of economic sanctions.
In 2018, then-US President Donald Trump withdrew the country from the Iran nuclear deal and imposed new sanctions against the Iranian regime.
Tehran resumed uranium production after Trump pulled out of the deal. During Joe Biden’s presidency, Iran’s nuclear program, as Axios noted, “made significant progress”. In late December 2023, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) reported that Iran had increased the rate of production of uranium enriched to 60% (uranium enriched to 90% or higher is required for the production of nuclear weapons).
The Biden administration has been in indirect talks with Iran to revive the Iran nuclear deal. Those efforts collapsed in late 2022 when the US accused Iran of making “unfounded” demands related to an International Atomic Energy Agency investigation into unexplained traces of uranium found at undisclosed Iranian sites. In the months that followed, the administration maintained that the Iran nuclear deal was “off the table”.
Iranʼs new president has suggested they are open to engaging with the West. However, a senior State Department official told CNN that they no longer believe in returning to the nuclear deal because Iran has taken too many escalating actions in the years since the talks collapsed.
In July, the US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said that Iran could likely produce enough material for a nuclear weapon in a week or two. He noted that the US policy is to prevent Iran from having a nuclear weapon and that the administration would prefer to stop that through diplomacy.
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