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‘Snapback’ move will cost you everything: Iran FM warns UK, France, Germany

Saturday, September 13


Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi has warned the UK, France, and Germany that if they kept up their underway intense efforts to reactivate the UN Security Council’s sanctions against Iran, they would risk incurring irreparable damage.

The top diplomat passed the remarks in a post on X, former Twitter, on Saturday, addressing the trio, which is part of a 2015 nuclear agreement with the Islamic Republic, and their bid to use the deal’s so-called “snapback” mechanism to reinstate the sanctions.

Iran and its allies, Russia, and China, have repeatedly asserted that the European states’ refusal to commit to their obligations under the nuclear deal, including their returning of the sanctions that the deal had lifted, has robbed them of any excuse to resort to the “snapback.”

Araghchi likewise underlined the troika’s lack of any grounds to trigger the mechanism, besides warning of the irreversible consequences that such a move would cause.

“It is not just that the E3 has no legal, political, or moral entitlement to invoke ‘snapback,’ and that even if they did, ‘use or lose it’ doesn't work,” he said.

“It's that the correct expression for the E3's dilemma is ‘use it *and* lose it.’ Or better yet, ‘use it and lose it *all*.’”

Iran has warned that the trio’s potential success in having the mechanism deployed would prompt the country to take several momentous retaliatory steps.

Those include termination of an agreement between the country and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) that was reached recently in order to help resumption of cooperation between the two sides.

According to Iranian officials, another option open to the country is withdrawal from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).

Also on Saturday, the foreign minister detailed the agreement with the IAEA during an extraordinary meeting with the members of Majlis (the Iranian Parliament)'s National Security and Foreign Policy Committee.

Addressing reporters on the sidelines of the meeting, Ebrahim Azizi, head of the committee, pointed to the potential of withdrawal from the NPT upon the European states’ intransigence.

He, however, also noted that “if the Europeans and the agency fulfill their commitments, it has been agreed that under this same agreement the ‘snapback’ issue will be set aside unless the Europeans renege on their pledges or the agency proves unable to meet its obligations.”

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