Reducing pressure on Iran will not moderate its position, a senior Israel official said Thursday, after the US announced it was prepared to lift some sanctions.
State Department spokesman Ned Price said on Wednesday that the US is “prepared to take the steps necessary to return to compliance with the [Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action], including by lifting sanctions that are inconsistent with the JCPOA.”
The JCPOA is the 2015 nuclear deal between Iran and world powers, which placed limitations on the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program which are due to expire in 2030, along with the gradual lifting of sanctions.
The US left the deal in 2018, imposing new sanctions in a “maximum pressure” campaign. US President Joe Biden, however, seeks to return to the JCPOA, followed by negotiations to make the agreement “longer and stronger,” as US Secretary of State Antony Blinken has said.
The latest remarks on American willingness to lift sanctions came as the US and Iran were involved in indirect talks in Vienna on returning to the JCPOA. Iran has said it will not reduce its uranium enrichment or abandon uranium metal development, both violations of the JCPOA, until the US revokes all post-2018 sanctions.
The European countries which are party to the JCPOA – the UK, Germany and France – released statements in recent months saying that Iran’s enrichment of uranium to 20% and its development of uranium metal have no credible civilian use.
The senior Israeli official said that “one of our problems with the American position,...is that, if you ask people here in the region, the Iranians have moderated their position only when there has been persistent and determined pressure on them” to do so.
In other words, “lifting the leverage that you have…is not the way to get the Iranians to moderate their position.”
The official also argued that the Iranians will not agree to strengthening the JCPOA if pressure on them is reduced.
“The Iranians aren’t going to want that, because the current (2015) deal is great for them. If you reduce pressure just to return to the old (2015) deal, you won’t get a new (longer and stronger) deal. Why would they agree to something that would seriously prevent them from getting a nuclear weapon in that situation?” he asked.
The official pointed to Iran’s most recent violations of the Iran deal as “proof” that the JCPOA does not block its path to a nuclear weapon, because “it left the Iranians with an infrastructure in place so they can decide when they want to do things that even the Europeans say have no plausible civilian use.”