“When I left for the fifth round of talks with Mr. Whitcoff on May 23, I wrote: ‘Zero nuclear weapons equals agreement; zero enrichment equals no agreement,’” Araghchi stated.
He added that if Trump “looks at the minutes of those negotiations—which were recorded by the mediators—he will see how close we were to celebrating a new and historic nuclear agreement.”
The Foreign Minister stressed that the U.S. administration should have learned from past mistakes. “There was never any intelligence proving that Iraq concealed weapons of mass destruction. What followed were unimaginable destructions, thousands of American casualties, and seven trillion dollars wasted from U.S. taxpayers’ money,” he said.
Araghchi compared the current approach to that period, noting that “likewise, there is no ‘intelligence’ showing that Iran was a month away from developing nuclear weapons had Israel not deceived the U.S. into attacking the Iranian people.”
He said the Israeli regime, after the failure of that operation, “is now trying to fabricate an imaginary threat out of Iran’s defensive capabilities,” while “Americans are tired of fighting Israel’s endless wars.”
Underscoring Iran’s resilience, Araghchi said: “Iran is a great nation, the heir to a great ancient civilization. Buildings and machinery may be destroyed, but our willpower will never be shaken. Insisting on such miscalculations will solve nothing. There is no solution other than reaching a negotiated one.”