President Hassan Rouhani, architect of Iran’s diplomatic opening to world powers, said yesterday it had “red lines” and would not bow to threats in an apparent bid to keep hardliners on side as Tehran edges toward a deal on its nuclear programme.
He was speaking to the Iranian Parliament, a bastion of wary conservatives, a day after the Islamic Republic and the six powers narrowed differences at talks in Geneva and decided to resume them on November 20 to try to defuse a decade-old standoff and fears of a drift towards a wider Middle East war.
The sides seemed on the verge of a breakthrough – before cracks materialised among US and European allies as France declined to endorse the proposal under discussion, believing it did not adequately neutralise the risk of an Iranian atom bomb.
French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius told France Inter radio that Paris desired a nuclear settlement with Iran but could not accept a “fool’s game” – in other words, one-sided concessions to Tehran.
Diplomats said France wanted any deal to require a shutdown of Iran’s Arak heavy-water reactor, of potential use in making bomb-grade plutonium, and the removal of Iran’s stockpile of higher-enriched uranium. Another stubborn issue was the extent and sequencing of relief from sanctions demanded by Tehran.
Israel, which calls Iran’s nuclear drive a mortal threat, condemned the interim deal taking shape in Geneva as it would leave some of Iran’s nuclear fuel-making capacity intact rather than dismantle it, while giving Tehran respite from sanctions.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu served notice that Israel would not feel bound by such a deal, unmistakably reiterating a veiled threat to take military action if it deems diplomacy to restrain Iran’s nuclear ambitions a dead end.
Rouhani told the Iranian Parliament that his negotiators had told their big power interlocutors in Geneva, “We will not answer to any threat, sanction, humiliation or discrimination.”
France says won’t accept fool’s game
He did not explain his reference to threats against Iran, but Netanyahu’s condemnation of the talks loomed large, as did the ideological resistance of powerful conservative hardliners in Iran’s establishment to any mending of fences with the West.
By “discrimination” and “humiliation”, he may have been alluding to pressure from US and Israeli hawks for Iran to scrap its entire nuclear programme, which Tehran says is wholly peaceful in nature.
“The Islamic Republic has not and will not bow its head to threats from any authority,” Rouhani said. “For us there are red lines that cannot be crossed. National interests are our red lines that include our rights under the framework of international regulations and (uranium) enrichment in Iran.”
Netanyahu said yesterday it was good that no deal with Iran was clinched at the weekend and that he had lobbied against scaling back sanctions by telling leaders: “What’s the rush?”
He said he recognised there was still “a strong desire” to reach an accord with Iran and pledged an all-out Israeli effort to prevent “a bad agreement”, a stance likely to cause more friction with Israel’s main ally, the US.
Indeed, the right-wing Israeli premier took his case straight to the American public yesterday, appearing on network television to decry “a very bad deal” he feared the Obama administration was pursuing.
US Secretary of State John Kerry, alluding to criticism of the US approach in Geneva, said on US television: “We are not blind, and I don’t think we’re stupid. I think we have a pretty strong sense of how to measure whether or not we are acting in the interests of our country and of the globe.”
The fact that any deal might be feasible after a decade of increasingly heated confrontation between Iran and Western powers, shows the striking shift in the tone of Iranian foreign policy since Rouhani’s landslide election victory in June.
Rouhani, a relative moderate, opened diplomatic windows to a nuclear deal in order to alleviate sanctions that have throttled Opec giant Iran’s lifeblood oil industry and cut it off from the international banking system.
He has won crucial public backing from Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s ultimate authority.