“Some analysts advocate for a ‘better deal with #Iran’. They forgot that the perfect is the enemy of the good. The return to the original deal is by itself a big challenge. Any attempt ‘to improve’ it would require years of negotiations w/o any guarantee of positive result,” Mikhail Ulyanov said in a tweet on Sunday.
The remarks came after Germany’s top diplomat, Heiko Maas, in an interview with Spiegel magazine released on Friday, spoke of what he called a “nuclear deal plus” with Iran that would also cover the country’s conventional missile program and regional role.
Maas said “a return to the previous agreement will not be enough,” and that “there will have to be a kind of ‘nuclear deal plus’, which is also in our interest.”
In response, Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif reminded the European signatories to the Iran deal — Germany, France and Britain — of their own “malign behavior” in the Middle East region and failure to live up to their obligations under the multilateral nuclear deal following the US’s unilateral pullout in May 2018.
Under intense pressure from Washington, the Europeans failed to fulfill their side of the bargain by neutralizing the sanctions that the US re-imposed on Iran in the aftermath of its exit, which was meant to force Iran back to the negotiating table for expanding the deal to include the country’s missile program and regional role.
A year into Washington’s withdrawal and the ensuing European failure to protect its business ties with Iran, Tehran began suspending parts of its commitments under the JCPOA on a step by step basis in retaliation.
The Europeans, however, continued to fail to put their verbal support for the deal into action, ultimately prompting the Iranian Parliament to intervene in the case and vote for a law designed to protect Iran’s interests against the Western sanctions.
The law — named the Strategic Action Plan to Counter Sanctions — will require the administration to suspend even more contractual obligations if the European trio does not provide Iran with the sanctions relief it has been promised under the JCPOA in two months.