Top Iranian politician appeals to Trump to restart nuclear deal negotiations
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Mohammad Javad Zarif says he hopes new Trump administration will be more serious, focused and realistic. A senior Iranian politician has appealed to Donald Trump to begin new negotiations with Tehran over its civil nuclear programme, saying: “I hope that this time around, [Trump 2.0] will be more serious, more focused, more realistic.”.
Mohammad Javad Zarif, Iran’s vice-president for strategic affairs, pointed out that the returning US president had not reappointed figures from his first term such as the former secretary of state Mike Pompeo and national security adviser John Bolton, who persuaded him in 2018 to quit the nuclear deal on the basis that withdrawal would lead to the regime’s collapse.
Instead, Zarif said, withdrawal had left Iran closer to obtaining a nuclear bomb, with the components including highly enriched uranium, although he claimed Tehran was not interested in actually making such a weapon. Zarif, probably the best known Iranian diplomat in the west, was speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos in his first remarks outside Iran since his country’s election of a reformist government.
He said the continuation of US sanctions was hitting the most vulnerable in Iran hardest and insisted Iran did not want to become a nuclear power. “If we wanted to build a nuclear weapon we could have done so a long time ago,” Zarif said. He also gave the impression that Iranian society was liberalising, saying women could be seen on the street not wearing the hijab. He said the Iranian leadership had decided not to put pressure on women to obey the law. “It’s a step in the right direction but it is not enough,” he said.
