Iranian threats make collision with US possible

Islam Mohamed

Latest threats by Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif that his country would further reduce commitment to the 2015 nuclear deal came to complicate the situation in the region even more.

Iran said earlier that it would reduce commitment to the deal in September. It said it would have to do this if parties to the deal had not taken enough measures to encourage it to continue abiding by it.

“We said that we would not fully honor the nuclear deal if other parties to it had not fully honored it,” Zarif said.

He said his government would decide whether it would move ahead with the nuclear deal commitment reduction in the coming days or not.

Zarif noted that his country would move into the third phase of the commitment if other parties had not honored it to the full.

Iran blackmails its European partners in the deal in order to force them into buying its oil. Iran needs to sell its oil to rescue its economy which faces hardships because of the US sanctions.

The US has, meanwhile, renewed its sanctions waivers on Russia, China and some European states.

According to press reports, the US Department of the Treasury is behind the decision to renew the waivers for fear of imposing the sanctions on Chinese, Russian and European companies that implement projects inside Iran, in the light of the 2015 nuclear deal between Iran and world powers.

The waivers allow Iran to cooperate peacefully with western states, in a bid to induce Tehran to scrap its nuclear activities.

On May 8, Iran agreed to keep honoring some of its commitments in the nuclear deal. This came almost a year after the US decided to pull unilaterally out of the agreement.

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani said earlier that his country had already exceeded the 3.67% uranium-enrichment limit stipulated in the nuclear deal. This was part of a two-month deadline to other countries that remained in the deal to help it overcome the effects of the sanctions.

After July 7, Iran said it raised its uranium-enrichment activities to 5%. It also said it raised the amount of enriched uranium in its possession to 300 kilograms.

Ali Akbar Velayati, an advisor of the Iranian supreme leader Ali Khamenei, accused the US of directly violating the nuclear deal.

The Europeans also violate the deal, but in an indirect manner, he said.

He said Iran would enrich more uranium in the light of its future peaceful needs.

Iranian affairs specialist Mohamed Aladdin said it is still early to predict what Iran will do in the future.

He said Iran would have created a very complicated situation if it operates the Arak reactor.

“Once it is operated, the reactor cannot be stopped by force,” Aladdin told The Reference.