Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif on Wednesday accused Washington of being “obsessed” with sanctions as a new round of high-stakes bilateral nuclear negotiations opened in New York.
“We are committed to resolving this issue,” Zarif told a US think-tank, as a US Department of State official confirmed that the two sides had resumed talks in New York late on Wednesday.
However, Zarif argued part of the problem blocking a deal was the US “infatuation” with sanctions.
“This deal would require the United States to lift the sanctions, and the reason Congress is objecting to this is that it wants to keep these sanctions,” Zarif told the Council on Foreign Relations.
“Sanctions have become an end in themselves. Sanctions do not serve any purpose,” he argued, saying during the time that the Iranian economy has been slapped with Western measures the number of the country’s centrifuges has soared from 200 to 20,000.
“So sanctions have produced, just in normal calculus, 18,800 centrifuges,” he said, joking it was “simple maths.”
US Secretary of State John Kerry told lawmakers the aim was to reach a deal under which “any pathway to a bomb will be eliminated” and “we have the ability to come to you and say the world is safer, our allies in the region are safer.”
“That’s the goal. We’re not there yet. I don’t know if we can get there,” said Kerry, who has insisted that military action against Iran’s suspect nuclear facilities has not been ruled out.
The two sides missed a July target date for a deal following an interim deal under which Iran agreed to freeze its uranium enrichment in return for access to about US$7 billion in oil revenues frozen in bank accounts around the world.
The five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany — known as the P5+1 — are returning to the negotiating table with Iran seeking to reach a deal to scale back Tehran’s nuclear activities by a new Nov. 24 deadline.
Zarif said “Iran has shown that we will live up to every agreement that we have.”
A senior State Department official said the bilateral Iranian-US talks would resume again yesterday in New York before the full P5+1 plenary session today.
The talks are expected to last throughout next week on the sidelines of the annual UN General Assembly, and will be joined at some point by foreign ministers.
Meanwhile, Zarif ruled out cooperating with the US in helping Iraq fight Islamic State militants and warned that the terrorist group poses a much broader global threat that needs new thinking to eradicate.
Zarif said that Iran has serious doubts about the willingness and ability of the US to react seriously to the “menace” from the Islamic State group “across the board” and not just pick and choose where to confront it as it has just started doing in Iraq.
“This is a very mobile organization,” he told the Council on Foreign Relations. “This is not a threat against a single community nor a threat against a single region. It was not confined to Syria, nor will it be confined to Iraq. It is a global threat.”
Iran was the first country to provide help to Iraq when the Islamic State group swept across the border from Syria in July. France wanted Iran to attend an international conference in Paris on Monday aimed at coordinating actions to crush the Islamic State extremists in Iraq, but the US said “no.”
Zarif called the 24 participating nations at the Paris conference “a coalition of repenters” because most supported the Islamic State group “in one form or another” from its inception following the US invasion of Iraq in 2003.
At the end of the day, he said, they created “a Frankenstein that came to haunt its creators.”
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