Thursday, June 20, 2024

‘Nobody Follows It’: U.N. Nuclear Watchdog Says Obama’s 2015 Iran Deal ‘Means Nothing’

Rafael Grossi, director of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), said on Monday that former President Barack Obama’s 2015 nuclear deal with Iran “exists only on paper and means nothing.”

“Nobody applies it, nobody follows it. There have been attempts to revive it here in Vienna. But unfortunately, although they were relatively close to success, they failed for reasons unknown to me, because I was not involved in the process,” Grossi complained to Russia’s Izvestia newspaper.

The 2015 nuclear deal, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), was never submitted to Congress for ratification. Critics of the deal accused Iran of cheating from the start. Israeli intelligence obtained documents in 2018 that showed the Iranian government secretly violated its non-proliferation commitments under the agreement.

Former President Donald Trump withdrew the United States from the JCPOA in May 2018. Trump said it was clear that “we cannot prevent an Iranian nuclear bomb under the decaying and rotten structure of the current agreement.”

Iran was nominally still bound to its agreement with the European powers that signed the JCPOA, but Tehran has largely treated the agreement like a dead letter since Trump withdrew, and arguably for quite some time before that. READ MORE