Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif did not respond directly to the House vote, but he called the nuclear deal a “triumph of diplomacy over coercion” on Twitter, and said some US politicians keep using the same “tired slogans” and “old methods that produce the same old failures”. Iran has also persisted conducting provocative behavior in the region, carrying out a series of missile tests in recent months that USA and U.N. officials have said contradict the spirit of the deal, but which the US has found itself unable to pursue in the U.N. Security Council because of the language included in the accord.
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The attempted launch came two days before the anniversary of the Iran deal’s signing on July 14 of a year ago. “The United States must reserve the right to hold Iran accountable for its actions, and that is exactly what this legislation will do, imposing stricter sanctions tied to the specific actions outside of the nuclear portfolio”.
The talks hit a breakthrough point in late 2013 when Iran and the group that included the United States, Britain, China, France, Russia and Germany reached an interim agreement with some limits on Iran’s nuclear activity and the easing of some sanctions.
“A program that so many people said will not work, a program that people said is absolutely doomed to see cheating and be broken and will make the world more unsafe, has, in fact, made the world safer, lived up to its expectations”, Kerry said in Paris. On Friday, 15 Democratic senators led by Gary Peters of MI sent President Obama a letter urging the administration “to ensure that the IAEA releases all relevant technical information” about its compliance inspections, “so that we may continue to make our own judgments about the status of Iran’s nuclear program”. It also ended numerous West’s financial, trade and oil sanctions that had hit Iran’s economy hard.
Specifically, the bill calls for new mandatory sanctions against entities involved with Iran’s ballistic missile program and those that transact with them.
The test violated a United Nations resolution that bars Iran from conducting ballistic missile tests for eight years.
At the same time, the US has not abandoned holding Iran’s feet to the fire on issues outside of the JCPOA. We must speak to Iran in the language they understand: “There will be consequences”.
Representative Ed Royce, chairman of the House’s Foreign Affairs Committee, denied that the legislation would violate the nuclear deal whatsoever, insisting “it would deter Iran from producing heavy water by making its sale more hard”, according to Reuters.
Secretary of state John Kerry brushed off those concerns as he hailed the agreement’s first anniversary.
The sanctions are also hindering foreign investment.
The Congress Republicans have long described the heavy water purchase a subsidy to Iran’s nuclear program, triggering the White House’s response on Monday when it threatened to veto the bill.
Rep. Bill Huizenga (R-MI) sponsored this week’s bill (H.R. 5711) to prohibit the Secretary of the Treasury from authorizing transactions of aircraft to Iran, which was identical to one of the amendments already passed last week. In April, the US Department of Energy said it will buy 32 metric tons of heavy water from Iran worth $8.6 million.
All 15 Democrats supported the nuclear deal, which survived a GOP-led effort past year to block the agreement.
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Rep. Eliot Engel of NY, the senior Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said the GOP bills have “zero chance of becoming law”, since they are unlikely to pass the Senate and would face a near-certain veto from Obama if approved by Congress. Meanwhile, steps that opponents call “concessions” to Iran are simply part of the deal, the administration says. The deal’s terms focused only on curtailing Iran’s nuclear program.
