Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian on Tuesday left the door open for peace talks with the United States despite ordering the suspension of Tehran’s cooperation with the United Nations International Atomic Energy Agency the next day.
Pezeshkian’s Wednesday announcement, ending international oversight of the regime’s nuclear program, comes a week after the Iranian parliament voted to suspend cooperation with the IAEA after years of conflict with the U.N.’s nuclear watchdog. The regime has also banned the head of the IAEA from its nuclear sites and is removing surveillance cameras from such facilities.
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“We are aware of these reports,” an IAEA spokesman told the Washington Examiner. “The IAEA is awaiting further official information from Iran.”
Despite spurning independent scrutiny of its controversial nuclear program, Iran suggested Tuesday that it remains open to negotiating a peace deal in the Middle East after it faced military strikes from the U.S. and Israel targeting the regime’s nuclear program.
“The doors of diplomacy will never slam shut,” Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi told CBS News, although he said negotiations were unlikely to start this week.
“In order for us to decide to reengage, we will have to first ensure that America will not revert back to targeting us in a military attack during the negotiations,” Araghchi continued. “And I think with all these considerations, we still need more time.”
His comments come after Trump floated the possibility of signing an agreement with Iran and lifting sanctions on the regime during a news conference at the NATO summit in The Hague, Netherlands, last week. The president said last week that although he didn’t believe an agreement was necessary because he believed U.S. strikes had dealt a massive blow to the regime’s nuclear capabilities, he was still planning on meeting with Iranian officials.
However, two days later, the president pulled back from negotiations after Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei released an inflammatory, anti-U.S. statement. And on Monday, Trump appeared to confirm that the U.S. is no longer involved in peace talks, saying he was “not offering Iran anything.”
The president initially attracted Tehran’s anger after authorizing strikes against three Iranian nuclear sites last month, after Israel conducted a wide-ranging and successful attack targeting the regime’s nuclear and military capabilities.
Just hours before Israel carried out the strikes on June 13, the IAEA passed a resolution declaring Tehran in noncompliance with its nuclear safeguards obligations for the first time in two decades.
A joint statement from Iran’s foreign ministry and nuclear agency swiftly denied findings that the regime was conducting secretive nuclear activity in violation of previous agreements, denouncing the IAEA resolution as “politically motivated,” and saying Tehran would take “appropriate measures” in response to any actions taken against it. Iran additionally threatened to launch a “new uranium enrichment facility in a secure location.” Uranium is vital to the development of nuclear weapons.
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Iran’s move to withdraw from the IAEA this week comes after Iran has been accused of dodging the U.N. affiliate’s nuclear inspectors for years. And the IAEA had also previously found the regime in violation of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action — an agreement former President Barack Obama signed with Iran in 2015 that sought to limit its nuclear capabilities.
During his first term in office, Trump suggested that Obama’s deal failed to grant IAEA inspectors sufficient access to multiple Iranian military sites suspected of being utilized to develop nuclear weapons, failing to resolve pre-JCPOA concerns that Iran was preventing investigators from investigating the full extent of its nuclear program.