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US, Europeans urge Iran to keep allowing nuclear inspections

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Top European and US officials are urging Iran to keep allowing United Nations nuclear inspections to salvage a 2015 deal between Tehran and world powers and to cool global tensions over Iran’s atomic ambitions.

The foreign ministers of France, Germany and Britain met Thursday in Paris to discuss security in Iran and the region, and US Secretary of State Tony Blinken joined them by videoconference.

The minsters expressed their “shared fundamental security interest in upholding the nuclear non-proliferation regime,” Britain said.

“Regarding Iran, the E3 and the United States expressed their shared fundamental security interest in upholding the nuclear non-proliferation regime and ensuring that Iran can never develop a nuclear weapon,” the foreign ministry said.

The ministers also “expressed their shared concerns over Iran’s recent actions to produce both uranium enriched up to 20% and uranium metal,” it said in a statement.

Iran has said it will stop part of International Atomic Energy Agency inspections of its nuclear facilities next week if the West doesn’t implement its own commitments under the 2015 deal. The accord has been unraveling since Donald Trump pulled the US out of the agreement in 2018.

German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas warned that Iran was “playing with fire” and could jeopardize efforts to get the United States back as a signatory now that Trump no longer is in office.

“We are the ones who have kept this agreement alive in recent years, and now it’s about supporting the United States in taking the road back into the agreement,” Maas told reporters in Paris.

“The measures that have been taken in Tehran and may be taken in the coming days are anything but helpful. They endanger the Americans’ path back into this agreement. The more pressure that is exerted, the more politically difficult it will be to find a solution,” he said.

The accord aims to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear bomb, which it says it doesn’t want to do. Tehran has been using its violations of the deal to put pressure on the remaining signatories — France, Germany, Britain, Russia and China — to provide more incentives to Iran to offset crippling. sanctions the Trump administration re-imposed after pulling out of the deal.

The United States is working closely with allies to engage and coordinate about the future of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said.

“Iran is a long way from compliance,” Psaki told an online briefing, saying the US government was focused on preventing Iran from acquiring a nuclear capability.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel and the president of the European Council spoke with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani this week to try to end the diplomatic standoff.

Michel said that he told Rouhani that the European Union backed full implementation of the nuclear deal.

“Preserving a space for diplomacy, underpinned by positive steps, is crucial at this stage,” Michel tweeted.

The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the UN nuclear watchdog, is scheduled to travel to Iran this weekend to find a solution that allows the agency to continue inspections.

In Iran, Rouhani expressed hope Thursday that the Biden administration will rejoin the accord and lift the US sanctions that the United States re-imposed under Trump, according to state television.

Ahead of Thursday’s talks in Paris, US State Department spokesperson Ned Price urged Iran to “provide full and timely cooperation with the IAEA.”

He insisted that “the path for diplomacy remains open….We hope to be able to pursue it together with our allies and partners.”

Following the meeting, the US said it was easing draconian restrictions imposed by Trump’s administration on movements of Iranian diplomats accredited at the UN, headquartered in New York City, as part of a bid to reduce tensions.

“The idea here is to take steps to remove unnecessary obstacles to multilateral diplomacy by amending the restrictions on domestic travel. Those had been extremely restrictive,” a State Department official told reporters.

As part of his maximum pressure campaign on Iran, Trump in 2019 barred Iranian diplomats from all but a few blocks around the UN and their mission, with Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif saying he was even prohibited during a UN visit from visiting a colleague in a New York hospital.

The State Department said that Iranian diplomats would still be subject to restrictions on diplomats applied to nations with poor relations with the US, such as North Korea, who need authorization to go beyond a 25-mile (40-kilometer) radius from Midtown Manhattan.

President Joe Biden’s administration also said Thursday it was ready to meet with Iranian officials under EU auspices to jumpstart diplomacy and reversed Trump’s widely derided contention that the United States snapped back UN sanctions against Iran.

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