Reduction of Iran’s Commitment to JCPOA Reversible: President

Addressing a weekly cabinet session of Wednesday, President Rouhani said Iran will immediately resume carrying out the JCPOA if the other signatories return to all of their commitments and make up for the harms to Iranian people.

What Iran has done was a “reduction of commitments in return for reduction of commitments”, the president said, noting that the other sides began not only to reduce the JCPOA commitments, but almost abandoned their undertakings.

“Not only the US, which withdrew (from the JCPOA), but also the remaining ones unfortunately failed to honour their commitments appropriately. They fulfilled (commitments) to a very small extent,” he said.

The president said Iran began a phased reduction in its commitments under the JCPOA after official announcements in five stages at two-month intervals.

“What has been announced and is planned to be carried out in Natanz, namely the installation of new modern IR-2M centrifuges, is not anything new as some Europeans have raised hue and cry and have resorted to clamor. There is no place for clamor,” the president added.

“What we are doing in Natanz today is exactly based on the official announcements made by me, the administration, and the authorities. We had announced that we would reduce commitments,” President Rouhani stated.

Iran has always announced that its decisions to reduce the JCPOA commitments are reversible, the president underlined, adding, “We may even run 10,000 centrifuges now, however, we would easily shut down those 10,000 machines whenever we’d like to. They might be operating today, but we can turn them off in one hour or half an hour. Therefore, they (Iran’s measures) are reversible in the first place.”

“Secondly, whenever the (Group) 5+1 or the (Group) 4+1 honours all of its commitments, we will return to all of our commitments as well. I have already announced that it would take no time for the two parties to return to the commitments. It only needs resolve,” President Rouhani stressed.

On his American counterpart’s decision to pull the US out of the JCPOA in 2018, President Rouhani said it all happened after a “poorly-educated guy with business-oriented spirits scribble-scrabbled a sheet of paper”.

However, he said, the next US president can rejoin the JCPOA. “It just needs a signature. That’s all, and we’ll again return to the first place. No big deal. It won’t take time at all… It doesn’t require negotiations at all. It won’t require anything.”

If the other JCPOA parties, with or without the US, return to “all of their commitments and make up for what they have done against the Iranian nation”, Tehran will return to all of its commitments as well, the president added.

“What the outgoing US administration did was to the detriment of itself, to the detriment of world’s trust in the US, in line with the isolation of the US, to the detriment of the regional nations, to the detriment of the Iranian nation, and to the detriment of regional stability. They (Americans) made a mistake a hundred percent,” President Rouhani added.

“We are ready (to honour JCPOA) whenever they return. We have announced since long ago that there is room for repentance. Whenever they return to the main road, we’ll be ready to return to the previous conditions,” the Iranian president concluded.