In an interview with the American journal of National Interest on Monday, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif reacted to US acts of sabotage in performing JCPOA, stressing that Iran has preserved the right for itself to withdraw from the deal.
“Well, we’ve taken a route that has been prescribed within the nuclear deal, taken it to the joint commission, and we will discuss that in the joint commission to make sure that the shortcomings by the United States are remedied,” Zarif said with regard to the violation cases from the US side.
“This has been the subject of an ongoing debate within the joint commission, not only during the Trump administration but also during the previous Obama administration, when it took the United States, for instance, several months to clear the purchase of airplanes” he went on.
Zarif stressed that in case of major violations of the deal provisions- what has been referred to as the “significant nonperformance” in the deal- then Iran other options are available for Iran, including withdrawal from the very deal.
Also in response to a question respected to the US President Donal Trump and his rhetorical behavior, Zarif said “the rhetoric is not conducive to greater understanding, not just with Iran but with other countries as well. We need to be more careful about the signaling, because we’ve seen that wrong signaling in the past few weeks in our region, particularly after the Riyadh summit, has caused a rather serious backlash in the region—not between US allies and Iran, but among US allies".
"So I believe it would be important to keep that in consideration, to understand the complexities of the situation” he added.
“As we’ve said in the past, we wanted that agreement to be the foundation and not the ceiling. But in order for that to serve as a solid foundation, we want to make sure that the obligations by all sides have been fully and faithfully implemented. And if we get that, then we have an opening to further progress,” he stressed.
Iran’s FM Zarif and his accompanying delegation left Tehran for New York on Thursday to take part in the UN meeting of the high-level political forum. Zarif is scheduled to hold talks with a number of officials and prominent figures participating in the international event.