Iran FM: There Won’t Be a Better Nuclear Deal Than 2015 Version

With expectations of a new round of talks with the EU member nations on trying to salvage the P5+1 nuclear deal in some form, Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif warns that no one should be expecting anything better than the deal as it was written in 2015.

Iran isn’t going into the talks hoping for anything better. Rather, Iran was quite happy with the 2015 deal, and quite unhappy that they never got what they were promised in the deal, because the US withdrew from the treaty and never delivered on sanctions relief.

Iran also wants everyone else to be clear that they’re not going to get any mre concessions from Iran tha\n they already had. Zarif called the idea that they could negotiate more out of Iran Trump’s “folly.”

The best everyone who wants to keep the deal can hope for is that Iran and the E3+2 can carve out a subset of the original deal, in which Iran gets enough sanctions relief to make it worth keeping the deal intact. Iran clearly sees little benefit to keeping the current pact in place if the other parties aren’t going to deliver on relief.