French President Emmanuel Macron said Friday the fate of a revived nuclear deal is up to Iran, and that an agreement would be “useful” even if it doesn’t settle everything.
Asked during a visit to Algeria about the chances of success in reviving the 2015 agreement between Tehran and world powers, Macron declined to speculate.
“Now the ball is in Iran’s court,” Macron told reporters.
Momentum has built to revive the landmark agreement that gave Iran sanctions relief in exchange for curbs on its nuclear program.
The parties to the 2015 deal with Iran saw it as the best way to stop the Islamic republic from building a nuclear bomb — a goal Tehran has always denied.
Former US president Donald Trump unilaterally withdrew from the pact in 2018, and reimposed crippling economic sanctions on Iran, which in turn began pulling back on its own commitments.
Just weeks after prospects of a revived deal looked dead despite months of talks, the European Union put forward on August 8 what it called a final text to restore the agreement.
Iran came back last week with a series of proposed changes, to which the United States formally responded on Wednesday.
“I think that it’s an agreement, if it is concluded in the terms which are presented today, which is useful,” said Macron, whose country is one of six which signed the original deal with Iran.
It is also “better than no agreement,” he added.
“But it’s also a deal which does not settle everything. We know that,” Macron said, referring to Iran’s regional role and alleged “destabilization” efforts.
Benjamin Netanyahu, the former Israeli prime minister, has sounded the alarm about a nuclear-armed Iran pursuing aggression against Israel, the Gulf states and “everybody else with impunity” if the proposed new nuclear deal materializes.
He described the idea of Iran having a nuclear umbrella as “very, very dangerous,” in addition to the possibility that the Iranians “may actually use (nuclear weapons) for the first time since the Second World War.”
Netanyahu’s warning came in an interview with Al Arabiya TV station on Wednesday amid reports that the US and Iran are closing in on an agreement to restore the 2015 accord after almost 17 months of indirect negotiations in Vienna.
“Well, I’m afraid it looks like it’s a done deal. And it’s a very, very bad deal,” Netanyahu told Al Arabiya. “Bad for Israel, bad for the Gulf States, bad for the Middle East, bad for the world. Because Iran is getting a highway paved with gold to a nuclear arsenal and they make no secret of their attempts to destroy us. Conquer the Middle East.
“I think this is a grave development. It’s a bad mistake. Iran is getting basically the ability to have 3,500 advanced centrifuges 10 times to 20 times more advanced than the few thousand that they have today. And US officials have expressed optimism about the latest efforts to revive the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), which the US under President Donald Trump left in 2018 and which Iran has increasingly violated since 2019.
As of the last public count by the International Atomic Energy Agency, Iran had a stockpile of some 3,800 kg of enriched uranium. More worrying for nonproliferation experts, Iran now enriches uranium up to 60 percent purity — a level it had not reached before. That is a short, technical step away from weapons-grade levels of 90 percent.
According to US media reports, the Biden administration has relayed its response to Iran’s comments on the draft proposal to restore the deal, more than a week after Iran sent its response to what the EU’s top diplomat Josep Borrell called “a final text.”
“They’re getting hundreds of billions of dollars by the end of the deal within less than a decade for their terror and aggression,” Netanyahu said, adding that the “most dangerous terrorist regime on Earth” is being “given a prize, both in weapons of mass death and enormous money, to pursue its aggression.”