President Joe Biden, during a press conference in Rome following the G20 meeting, openly acknowledged that President Donald Trump’s 2018 decision to pull the U.S. out of the JCPOA was a bad idea, only to then indicate that he was still going to use Trump’s sanctions to try to pressure Iran into coming back into compliance with the agreement. In the meeting with his British, French and German counterparts the day before, Biden said that “I found that I think we’re continuing to suffer from the very bad judgments that President Trump made in pulling out of the JCPOA.” The restoration of the JCPOA “is going to depend on — whether and how that gets resolved is going to depend on their (Iran’s) action and the willingness of our friends, who are part of the original agreement, to stick with us and make sure there’s a price to pay economically for them if they fail to come back.”
Biden was also asked whether the U.S. will retaliate for the attacks on U.S. troops in Syria, which are being blamed on Iran. “With regard to the issue of how we’re going to respond to actions taken by them against the interests of the United States — whether they’re drone strikes or anything else — is we’re going to respond, and we’re going to continue to respond,” he said.
In Tehran, Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Saeed Khatibzadeh blasted the joint statement the U.S., U.K., France and Germany issued from Rome on Oct. 30, saying that it contains unconstructive stances and is divorced from reality. The joint statement charged that there are no civilian uses for the uranium metal that Iran has been fabricating but the Iranian position is that the metal is needed for the Tehran Research Reactor which is used for producing medical isotopes. Khatibzadeh also reiterated that Iran is not seeking to produce nuclear weapons and that, in fact, it is prohibited by a fatwa issued by Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.
As for the JCPOA, Khatibzadeh said that if the U.S. abandons the policy of sanctions, agreement on restoring the JCPOA can be reached almost immediately. “We are waiting for action from Washington,” he remarked.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, during a press conference in Rome, fully backed Iran on the point that in order to come back into effect, the JCPOA must be re-implemented as it was originally agreed on in 2015. “If the sides are intensifying contacts, they apparently want to come to resuming the deal. It may be resumed solely in the form it was approved by the UN Security Council in 2015,” he said. “Any additions and any exemptions are unacceptable for the Iranian side. And we fully support this approach.
“If the sides agreed on something and if someone subsequently backtracked on the deal, it is necessary to seek returning to its full respect and observance,” Lavrov stressed.
