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The nuclear debate inside Iran is likely to shift towards the possession of its own weapons if the west goes ahead with a threat to reimpose all UN sanctions, the country’s foreign minister has said.
Seyed Abbas Araghchi said in an interview that Iran already had the capability and knowledge to create nuclear weapons, but said they did not form part of its security strategy. He also said Tehran was prepared to keep supplying arms to Hezbollah in Lebanon.
Western officials will be concerned by Araghchi’s warning over the reimposition of sanctions, which were lifted when Iran signed the 2015 deal intended to limit its nuclear activities.
Araghchi was appointed foreign minister by Iran’s reformist president, Masoud Pezeshkian, who was elected this year on a promise to improve Iran’s economy by pursuing improved relations with the west.
He was speaking in Lisbon before a meeting between Iranian and European negotiators in Geneva on Friday, which he described as a brainstorming session to see if there was a way out of their impasse. He admitted he was pessimistic about the meeting, saying he was not sure Iran was speaking to the right party.
He said he believed European nations – chiefly the UK, Germany and France – were set on confrontation after a board meeting last week of the UN nuclear inspectorate, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), in which a European-tabled censure motion was passed saying Iran had failed to cooperate with inspectors and was building a uranium stockpile that had no peaceful civilian purpose.
Araghchi claimed the IAEA director general, Rafael Grossi, had promised to forestall the censure motion after Iran offered to cap its uranium enrichment at 60% purity, as well as permit four nuclear inspectors to visit its nuclear sites. “He failed because the Europeans had decided on the course of confrontation,” he said.
The foreign minister said Iran had subsequently “decided to introduce thousands of new, highly advanced machines into the system. And now they have started to feed them with gas. So this is the result of their pressure.”
Araghchi said Iran remained within the confines of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, however, and still sought cooperation. “We have no intention to go further than 60% for the time being, and this is our determination right now,” he said. “I would like to re-emphasise that we have chosen the line of cooperation in order to come to a dignified resolution of this problem.”
But he suggested that Iranian engagement with the west on its nuclear programme was not guaranteed. “There is a debate right now in Iran that it was perhaps a wrong policy. Why? Because it proved we did whatever they wanted and when it was their turn to lift sanctions, in practice, they didn’t happen. So maybe something is wrong in our policy.
“So I can tell you, quite frankly, that there is this debate going on in Iran, and mostly among the elites – even among the ordinary people – whether we should change this policy or not, whether we should change our nuclear doctrine, as some say, or not, because it has proved insufficient in practice.”
He said if European countries did reimpose sanctions on Iran at the UN security council “then they [will] have convinced everybody in Iran that, yes, your doctrine has been wrong”.
He added: “And this is the result after 10 to 12 years of negotiation, and after 10 years of implementation and homework and all these things, now, Iran is back under chapter seven [of the UN charter], what for?
“If that happens, I think everybody will be convinced that we have gone in the wrong direction, so we have to change direction. So I think if the snapback happens we would have a crisis.”
But he said for the moment the fatwa against the possession of nuclear weapons could only be rescinded by the supreme leader. “Nuclear weapons have no place in our security calculations,” he said.
He also said that Iran had not supplied ballistic missiles to Russia, but that it is legitimate for Tehran to have close military cooperation with Moscow even though Iran supported the territorial integrity of Ukraine.
Aware that Iran’s supply of drones and other equipment to Russia for use in Ukraine has poisoned relations with Europe, Araghchi said: “They are not in any moral or political position to complain about our cooperation with Russia […] when at the same time they are selling themselves weapons, sophisticated weaponry to Israel to kill Palestinians.”
He added that Iran was prepared to continue supplying weapons to Hezbollah in Lebanon if requested by the group, adding Israel had agreed to a ceasefire only because it could not “finish the job”.
Giving his verdict on the outcome of the Lebanon confrontation, which many say has left Iran weakened, he said: “Why is Israel now ready for a ceasefire in Lebanon? Because they couldn’t finish the job, and they are not able to finish the job. Yes, Hezbollah has suffered, but it is mostly on its leadership and high level commanders, but the organisation is intact.”
He also ridiculed claims by the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, that Israel had agreed to the Lebanon ceasefire partly because Israel wanted to focus its energies on preventing Iran from securing a nuclear weapon.
“A full-scale war with Iran and a ceasefire in Lebanon? It doesn’t sound logical or understandable,” he said.
He said it would be a disaster if Israel launched a full-scale war against Iran. “That doesn’t mean that we want war. Contrary to Israelis, we don’t want war, but we are fully prepared for that, and we are not scared of war. And if they want to try us, they can do that.”
He said it was up to Hezbollah to decide if it wanted to withdraw its weaponry north of the Litani River, as set out in the ceasefire agreement with Israel, and said the group was not an Iranian proxy. “Hezbollah and others are not our proxies,” he said. “We only support them as our friends, so we have never dictated on them or any other resistance group in the region. They decide by themselves, and they implement their decisions by themselves.”
He said he believed it was the right decision by Hezbollah to end its link between the wars in Lebanon and Gaza in accepting the ceasefire, but questioned whether it would be followed by a further ceasefire in Gaza. “Israel cannot go for a ceasefire with Hamas, because a ceasefire with Hamas would be a total defeat for Israelis,” he said. “They went there to destroy Hamas, and now they have to make a deal with Hamas, and that means that they have failed to reach their goals. So a ceasefire in Gaza has become a very complicated question.”
He said that Israel’s intention was “the colonial erasure” of Palestinians, and it was up to the new US administration to decide if they would support this.
Asked if Iran’s foreign policy was causing domestic misery, he accepted that Pezeshkian won the presidential election because he wanted to leave sanctions and engage with the rest of the world but questioned if he had been welcomed by the west. “The morning after his inauguration ceremony, Ismail Haniyeh [the Hamas political bureau leader] was assassinated in Tehran,” he said. “I have spent my first 100 days as foreign minister trying to prevent a full-scale war.”
