Iran may use nuclear deal structure to try to isolate US
Foreign Minister Zarif has said Iran may file a complaint against Trump’s sanctions violations with the JCPOA’s Joint Commission.
President Donald Trump could soon face the first public test of his nuclear deal gambit as Iran weighs a formal complaint against the United States for violating the agreement.
Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif indicated last month that Iran may seek redress before the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action’s Joint Commission if the United States pulled out of the deal. The panel has no authority over US sanctions policy, but it could draw Iran and the remaining parties closer together — and isolate the United States.
“I expect them to do something within the structure of the Joint Commission,” Jarrett Blanc, who coordinated oversight of the deal for President Barack Obama’s State Department, told Al-Monitor. “Iran senses here both risk and opportunity. The opportunity is that for the first time in decades, the US doesn’t have the initiative. And Iran can try — it’s going to be difficult — but they can try to cement the wedge that the US has driven between ourselves and our closest allies.”
Zarif laid out the case for a JCPOA complaint in an interview last month with The New Yorker’s Robin Wright. Iran, he told her, could respond to a US withdrawal by resuming uranium enrichment or even pulling out of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, or it could file a complaint with the JCPOA panel, its 12th since the deal went into effect.
