Analysis by PMOI/MEK
Jan. 3, 2019 – The Iranian regime’s foreign ministry, which until recently was a staunch proponent of the European Special Purpose Vehicle, now explicitly expresses its disappointment through Javad Zarif and Bahram Ghasemi, the department’s minister and spokesperson respectively.
Iranian state-run Channel Two broadcaster reported on December 9 quoting Bahram Ghasemi: “The foreign ministry spokesman says that Europe couldn’t live up to the deadline it had committed to set up the financial exchange channel with Iran, known as the SPV. [They] don’t have the necessary capacity to defend their European identity and their financial and economic institutions against U.S. Ghasemi denied that [Europe] had set conditions for creating the financial channel and said that Iran isn’t sitting idly.”
“Currently, Europe is very much powerless against U.S. and U.S. pressure,” Ghasemi added.
On December 29, in an interview with a Chinese television channel, the Iranian foreign minister said about the SPV: “Europe can’t be a reliable trading partner for the world.”
State-run Iranian television said: “The foreign minister’s new estimation of JCPOA after three years! In an interview with China’s Phoenix television, Zarif answered the question of what he would’ve done if he knew three years ago that the U.S. would leave the JCPOA and said, if we went back three years, we would be more stringent. He said that if we wanted to write the agreement again today, first I’m skeptic that there will be a possibility for an agreement at all, and if we could reach an agreement, it would be something like what we achieved three years ago.”
One of the winning points that Hassan Rouhani’s government counted on in recent years was that they assumedly had succeeded in driving a wedge between the U.S. and Europe.
Ahmad Amirabadi, an Iranian MP from Khamenei’s faction and a former military commander of the Revolutionary Guards, recently said: “One of the consolations for the gentlemen is that we’ve driven a wedge between Europe and the U.S., while our goal from the negotiations wasn’t to stir up quarrels between countries.”
“Iran paid the costs for JCPOA, but the Americans didn’t pay anything for the JCPOA,” he added.
