Zarif hopes Trump would be ‘more realistic’ about Iran
Iran’s Vice President for Strategic Affairs Mohammad Javad Zarif expressed hope that the US president would be “more realistic” about Iran during his second term in office.
Addressing the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Zarif, who negotiated Iran’s nuclear agreement with world powers in 2015, said the US President Doland Trump should know that his withdrawal from the nuclear deal in 2018 led to a massive expansion of Iran’s nuclear program.
“I hope that this time around, a ‘Trump 2’ will be more serious, more focused, more realistic,” Zarif said.
The Iranian official said that Trump failed to achieve its goals to force Iran to curb its nuclear program by withdrawing from the nuclear agreement, also known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).
“Of course, he (Trump) has imposed heavy sanctions on Iran. He should know that the low-income people in Iran are suffering due to his sanctions,” Zarif said.
In response to a question about the claim by US intelligence sources that Iran has a few weeks to build a nuclear weapon, Zarif said, “Had we wanted to build a nuclear weapon, we could have done it a long time ago. A program to build nuclear weapons is not going to be like our program. You build nuclear weapons in hidden laboratories that are not subject to international inspection.”
Zarif emphasized that Iran is not a security threat. He said that some countries portray Iran as a security threat for the world.
“People who are worried about our nuclear program like the Israelis, they say we are days away from a nuclear weapon, so why didn’t they welcome the JCPOA. JCPOA in the worst analysis would have kept Iran away from nuclear weapons for at least 15 years. People, like Netanyahu, have claimed in the 1990s that Iran will have a nuclear weapon in 6 months.” And now they claim Iran is a couple of days away from a nuclear weapon.
“Iranophobia and Islamophobia are a tool for them to carry out actions similar to the genocide in Gaza. They say they are taking these actions against Iran. But they are genocide of children in Gaza,” Zarif said.
In 2015, Iran proved the peaceful nature of its nuclear program to the world by signing the nuclear deal, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), with six world powers.
However, Washington’s unilateral withdrawal in 2018 and its subsequent re-imposition of sanctions against Tehran left the future of the deal in limbo.
In 2019, Iran started to roll back the limits it had accepted under the JCPOA after the other parties, especially the European countries, failed to live up to their commitments.
Referring to the Israel’s onslaught on the Gaza Strip, where more than 47,000 Palestinians were killed in just 15 months of the regime’s strikes, Zarif said, “Right now as you look at Gaza… Netanyahu did not achieve his goal of destroying Hamas, Hamas is still there. Israel had to come to a ceasefire.”
“I wouldn’t suggest anybody start rejoicing over destroying Hamas as well as the Palestinian resistance, or cutting Iran’s arms, because the resistance will stay as long as they’re occupied,” he added.
“The resistance is not dead. I can tell you that the wishes for the resistance to go away have been based on a misrepresentation, a framing by Israel, that this is not an Israeli-Palestinian issue but an Israeli-Iranian issue.”