Iran Leaves Window Ajar as It Suspends Cooperation With United Nations Nuclear Watchdog

As Iran’s supreme leader mocks overtures for renewed nuclear talks and the Islamic Republic announces it is kicking out the United Nations’s nuclear watchdogs, Iranian officials are leaving a window slightly ajar for renewed communications.The doors were seemingly closed on Monday after the regime announced that it is pulling out of a September deal with the United Nations’s International Atomic Energy Agency to monitor its nuclear industry.The move was widely anticipated after Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Arghchi, said weeks ago that Iran would end the monitoring agreement if members of the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action reinstated sanctions. France, Germany, and the United Kingdom triggered the so-called snapback process after Iran failed to meet a 30-day deadline to get in compliance with international inspections rules. The renewed sanctions hit Iranian assets and arms deals, among other actions.“Following the activation of the Snapback mechanism, as @araghchi has previously stated, we will revise the Cairo Agreement, which we now consider invalid,” the secretary of Iran’s supreme national security council, Ali Larijani, said Monday, referencing the September negotiation brokered by Egypt to reinstate inspectors. “However, if the IAEA presents a new proposal for cooperation, it will be studied by the SNSC.”Speaking on Sunday, President Trump said the teetering peace deal between Israel and Hamas would not have happened if America hadn’t dropped 30,000-pound bunker-buster bombs on Iran’s underground nuclear facilities at Fordow, Natanz, and Esfahan last June. The facilities are where uranium enrichment activities were believed to have reached the threshold for building a nuclear weapon, despite years of monitoring by the International Atomic Energy Agency. “They went into that and they bombed the hell out of it, and when we destroyed their nuclear facilities, they no longer became the bully of the Middle East,” he told Fox News’s “Sunday Morning Futures.” “If we didn’t take out their nuclear, there’s no way we would’ve been able to do this.”Tehran declined Mr. Trump’s invitation to last week’s peace conference in Egypt to cement the cease-fire between Hamas and Israel, with its leadership saying it would not enter any direct negotiations with “Zionists” or “terrorists,” its descriptions for the United States.At Sharm el-Sheikh, Mr. Trump said the offer to meet with Iranian officials is still on the table. He suggested the Iranians say they don’t want to negotiate but they really do.“We are ready when you are, and it will be the best decision that Iran has ever made,” he said, adding, “Wouldn’t it be nice? I think they want to. I think they’re tired.”Rejecting any overtures, the supreme leader’s X account barked back at the president on Monday, asserting that the bombing attacks conducted by America on behalf of Israel’s Operation Rising Lion did not destroy Iran’s nuclear program.“The US President says that he makes deals and wants to make a deal with Iran. ‘Dealing’ where the outcome is predetermined using coercion isn’t a way of dealing. It’s a way of imposing something, and the Iranian nation will never submit to such impositions,” the English-language account attributed to Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said in a post.“The US President boasts that they’ve bombed and destroyed Iran’s nuclear industry. Very well, in your dreams!” reads another post. “Coercion may be effective when used against certain nations, but it will never be effective against the Iranian nation, by the Grace of God,” he continued.Despite the unusually vocal day — the ayatollah also gave a defiant speech to hand-picked guests at a meeting in Tehran — observers say underlying Iran’s bravado is a stumbling regime.“What the Supreme Leader presented as unity and defiance is, in fact, the language of a state trapped between economic ruin and military vulnerability,” a long-time regime opponent, the National Council of Resistance of Iran, wrote in a post on Monday. “Each boast about missiles or martyrdom conceals a deeper insecurity: the fear that any real compromise—whether on enrichment, missiles, or foreign intervention—would unravel the clerical order itself.”The Organization of Iranian Americans Communities, which advocates for regime change, says it doesn’t matter if Iran backs out of the watchdog deal, as the United Nations agreement is a fraud.“The multitudes of agreements the regime has signed with the IAEA, including the latest, have all served as deceptive diplomatic tools rather than genuine efforts towards non-proliferation or peace,” the group’s political director, Majid Sadeghpour, tells the Sun.

Iran Leaves Window Ajar as It Suspends Cooperation With United Nations Nuclear Watchdog

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