Brussels - British Foreign Secretary
Jeremy Hunt said on Monday that there was still time to save the
Iran nuclear deal and that despite the United States being
Britain's closest ally it disagreed on how to handle the Iran
crisis.
"Iran is still a good year away from developing a nuclear
bomb. There is still some closing, but small window to keep the
deal alive," Hunt told reporters on arrival for a foreign
ministers' meeting in Brussels.
The Brussels meeting will seek to flesh out how to convince
Iran and the United States to reduce tensions and initiate a
dialogue amid fears that the 2015 deal is close to collapse.
US-Iranian tensions have worsened since US President
Donald Trump decided last year to abandon the nuclear deal under
which Iran agreed to curtail its atomic programme in return for
relief from economic sanctions crippling its economy.
In reaction to the re-imposition of tough US sanctions,
which have notably targeted Iran's main oil revenue stream,
Tehran has scaled back on some of its nuclear commitments under
the deal, leading the European parties to the pact, France,
Britain and Germany, to warn it about not fully complying with
the terms.
When asked whether the European powers would seek to
penalise Iran for breaking parts of its nuclear commitments,
Hunt said they would seek a meeting of the parties to deal with
it.
President Hassan Rouhani speaks in a meeting during his provincial tour to the North Khorasan, Iran. Rouhani said his country is ready to negotiate with the United States if Washington lifts its economic sanctions. Picture: Iranian Presidency Office via AP
"We will and there’s something called a joint commission,
which is the mechanism set up in the deal which is what happens
when one side thinks the other side has breached it, that will
happen very soon,” he said.
The three powers, who are party to the deal alongside Russia
and China, have sought to defuse the tensions, which culminated
in a plan for US air strikes on Iran last month that Trump
called off at the last minute.
Hunt, who is vying to become British Prime Minister, said
that while he agreed with the United States on finding a
long-term solution to Iran's regional influence, he disagreed on
Washington's current approach.
“What the US knows is that we consider them our closest
ally, we believe the alliance between the UK and the US has
been the foundation of global peace and prosperity over the last
75 years, but friends sometimes disagree," he said.
"This is one of the very rare occasions when we do disagree,
but that doesn’t mean we don’t work very closely with them in
pursuit of peace."