‘Who can trust the US, if bully Trump kills predecessor’s deals?’ – Iran’s national security chief

Published time: 6 May, 2018 01:06

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© Carlos Barria / Reuters

Tehran has the capacity to withstand Donald Trump’s “bullying,” but his drive to revise or unilaterally scrap the 2015 nuclear deal undermines any credibility Washington might still have, a top Iranian security official has noted.

“This is an international agreement ... and we certainly have the capacity to defeat your [Donald Trump's] bullying,” Rear Admiral Ali Shamkhani, secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council (SNSC), told senior police commanders in Tehran on Saturday.

‘Bullying others’: Iranian FM slams US over its handling of nuclear deal

Iran, he stressed, refuses to renegotiate the crucial P5+1 nuclear agreement, also known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), noting that the country has no trust in the US leadership to honor its commitment.

“If the incumbent US president does not accept the agreements signed by his predecessors in the previous administration, then assuredly no country in the world is able to trust the US because it is also possible to see the coming administration do not accept the agreements brokered by Trumps’ administration,” the admiral asserted.

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“Who, then, guarantees that if something is done with you, the next president won't come and refuse to accept it?” he wondered.

With the May 12 deadline to re-certify the JCPOA looming, Donald Trump has repeatedly warned that Washington will unilaterally pull out unless some critical “flaws” of the deal –such as the absence of limits on any ballistic missile program– are not ‘fixed’. The US State Department even sent a diplomatic mission to the UK, Germany and France to rally support for its plan to amend or to scrap the agreement, the “spirit” of which Tehran is accused of breaching.

So far the European signatories remain committed to the agreement and have urged to White House to honor the deal, which is seen as one of the crucial cornerstones of regional and world security. Israel, however, which relentlessly lobbied the Obama administration not to sign the nuclear deal, at the start of the week made a pompous presentation, once again accusing Iran of “lying” about its nuclear program.

During the theatrical address at Israel’s Defense Ministry in Tel Aviv on Monday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu presented a slideshow claiming the 2015 Iran nuclear deal was “based on lies.” He showed some 100,000 copies of documents, allegedly stolen from Iran's secret nuclear archive, that he said prove Tehran “continued to preserve and expand its nuclear weapons know-how” after the signing of the deal. The United States was quick to back up Netanyahu’s PowerPoint claims.

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Amid fears of a possible escalation of tensions in the region, Admiral Shamkhani reassured law enforcement agencies on Saturday that “the formation of any war against Iran is impossible.”

“As the senior security official of this country, I assuredly articulate that no war against Iran is imaginable because of the enemies’ estimations of Iran’s political, security, and military might and readiness in all domestic and foreign aspects and also because of the lack of determination, solidarity, and operational power in our enemies,” the SNSC chief stressed.