Iran Rebuffs US, French Calls for New Talks
TEHRAN (Tasnim) – Iran’s Foreign Ministry dismissed the push for fresh talks with Tehran mooted at a meeting of the US and French presidents, stressing that subjects irrelevant to the 2015 nuclear deal would not help save the accord.
In a statement on Friday, Foreign Ministry Spokesman Abbas Mousavi rejected the anti-Iranian remarks by US President Donald Trump and his French counterpart Emmanuel Macron at a meeting in France, saying Trump’s hackneyed and paradoxical claims do not merit a reaction.
In response to Macron’s comments, the spokesman said, “Despite a series of speeches and political statements, the European parties (to the JCPOA) have so far failed to honor their commitments under the JCPOA and the commitments (they gave) after the US illegal withdrawal from the nuclear deal, and have been unable to prepare the ground for our country to get the full benefits according to this multilateral agreement.”
“Under such circumstances, by putting forward extra-JCPOA subjects, they (the French) not only do not provide any help to maintain the JCPOA, but also pave the way for further mistrust among the remaining parties to the agreement and steer the US closer to its purpose in exiting from the JCPOA illegally which was nothing else but the collapse of the deal,” Mousavi added.
He went on to say that Trump’s “repeated, groundless and paradoxical” comments in the meeting with Macron were so worthless that they do not merit a new response.
In their meeting in France on Thursday, Trump and Macron called for efforts to keep Tehran from what they called getting nuclear weapons.
"I don’t think we have differences over Iran… I don’t think that the president wants to see nuclear weapons and neither do I," Trump told reporters ahead of a bilateral meeting with Macron in Caen.
Macron also said Paris and Washington shared the same objective on Iran, saying they sought to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, reduce Iran's ballistic activity, contain Iran's regional activity and establish peace in the region.
"All the other debates are about technicalities," the French leader said, calling for fresh negotiations to extend the terms of the JCPOA and to achieve those goals.
