BRUSSELS-The European Union has rolled over until January 28 the modest sanctions suspension Iran won following the 2013 interim nuclear deal.
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From the Iranian perspective, the JCPOA is a test of whether or not it can trust the United States.
In October and November, Iran launched ballistic missiles in violation of United Nations sanctions.
Associated Press writer Adam Schreck in Dubai, United Arab Emirates contributed reporting. IRGC officials later said those reports were “speculation” and pointed out that no Iranian official had yet publicly confirmed that the sailors would be released.
On December 26, Iran fired two rockets within 1.5 kilometers of US and French naval ships that were in global waters of the Strait of Hormuz.
The vote came as the potentially volatile incident in Iran’s territorial waters was swiftly resolved.
“Iran has been on a bit of a tear”, said Representative Ed Royce, the Republican chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, as he sought support for the bill.
But Obama’s opponents argued that the sailors should never have been detained in the first place by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IGRC) and painted the episode as yet another example of belligerent Iranian behavior that had only been encouraged by a softer US stance towards Tehran.
Also under the deal, Iran must scale back its stockpile of low-enriched uranium – which it plans to do via a swap for non-enriched forms of uranium with Russian Federation, to remove concerns it could be put to developing nuclear bombs.
Behrouz Kamalvandi, the spokesperson for Iran’s atomic energy agency, said in an interview with Iran’s Etemad newspaper published on Monday that “Iran has met its commitments under the July nuclear agreement earlier than expected”.
A poster of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini is seen next to a bank of centrifuges in what was described by Iranian state television as a facility in Natanz in 2012.
Iran has always insisted its nuclear program was purely for peaceful purposes. Iranian President Hassan Rouhani and US President Barack Obama both have invested heavily in the nuclear negotiations, and each has paid a price at home in their pursuit. A federal report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office found just six companies – two from China and four from India – were working in the Iranian energy sector a year ago. The last time foreign sailors were taken by Iran was in 2007 when 15 British sailors were held for 13 days.
The sailors were interrogated for hours about their motives, but Iranian officials quickly determined they had not intentionally entered Iranian waters.
The fate of broader U.S.-Iran cooperation rests on whether or not the JCPOA is successfully implemented.
They have a path to break through that isolation and they should seize it. Because if they do, there’s incredible talent and resources and sophistication inside of – inside of Iran, and it would be a very successful regional power that was also abiding by worldwide norms and global rules, and that would be good for everybody.
“As soon as the IAEA confirms that Iran has taken the nuclear measures…”
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“At that point”, the senior State Department official said, “Foreign Minister Zarif said to the secretary that he had indications from the people who were holding our sailors that they would be free to go at dawn, that it was probably not safe for them to transit during the course of the night in dark”.
