Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said that the US has a limited opportunity to rejoin the 2015 nuclear deal, stressing that Washington must halt arms sale to the region and stop the massacre in Yemen.
“The time for the United States to come back to the nuclear agreement is not unlimited,” Zarif said in an interview with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour on Monday evening.
“The United States has a limited window of opportunity because President Biden does not want to portray himself as trying to take advantage of the failed policies of the former Trump administration.”
The 2015 nuclear deal between Tehran and world powers, officially known as the JCPOA, did not include Iran’s defensive capabilities because the US was not prepared to stop its arms sales to the region as a precondition, he answered when asked about the US call for inclusion of non-nuclear issues in the JCPOA.
“The nuclear deal was negotiated based on what we could agree and what we could not agree. This is the deal that was made,” Zarif said.
“The United States has to accept that … we decided not to agree upon certain things, not because we neglected them, but because the United States and its allies were not prepared to do what was necessary. Is the US prepared to stop selling arms to our region?”
Zarif said Iran “spends a seventh of Saudi Arabia on defense, with 2.5 times its population.”
“If it wants to talk about our defense … is the US prepared to reduce hundreds of billions of dollars of weapons it is selling to our region? Is the US prepared to stop massacre of children in Yemen if it wants to talk about the situation in Yemen,” he added, as qouted by Tasnim news agency.
“The United States was not prepared to discuss these issues when we negotiated the nuclear deal. That’s why we agreed to limit the deal,” the top Iranian diplomat noted.
Zarif also reiterated the Islamic Republic’s stance regarding the country’s ideological views that rejects seeking a nuclear weapon.
Source: Iranian media
