Bolton: US sanctions ‘possible’ on European firms over Iran

German Chancellor Angela Merkel said possibilities to save the deal without Washington needed to be discussed with Tehran, while France’s Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire said EU states would propose sanctions-blocking measures to the European Commission.

It also demanded that Iran cease supplying weapons to the Houthi rebels, who have been at war with Tehran’s archenemy Saudi Arabia, end cyberattacks against the USA and its allies, stop menacing US military ships in the Persian Gulf and abandon its rhetoric about destroying Israel.

“We hope recent events will lead us not to trust in the West and even Europeans”, he said on Sunday, according to the conservative-linked Fars news agency.

Unfortunately, President Trump has put us on a very different, more unsafe path.

“I think you have to start first with the fundamental deficiencies of the deal itself”, Bolton said.

Though Europe will do its best to keep the deal afloat and convince Iran to uphold its commitment without the United States, O’Sullivan said: “I very much doubt it will be possible to reinstate anything like that worldwide consensus [in the JCPOA] given that it is the United States walking away from a deal that Iran agreed to”. He said that he would work to protect European businesses from being hit by US measures if they continue to trade with Iran.

Secret Iranian documents stolen by Israel and underscore an existing U.S. intelligence assessment, the White House said, that Tehran “had a robust, clandestine nuclear weapons program that it has tried and failed to hide from the world and from its own people”.

This week, Israel and Iran engaged in an extensive military exchange on the heels of Trump’s decision to leave the deal.

Britain’s foreign minister Boris Johnson said that he will discuss ways to protect companies doing business with Iran during the meeting with his European counterparts on Tuesday before Mr Zarif joined the talks.

Iran’s foreign minister will seek support for key European investment deals when he visits Brussels Tuesday on the final leg of a whistlestop tour to shore up support for the 2015 landmark nuclear deal.

“The Prime Minister raised the potential impact of USA sanctions on those firms which are now conducting business in Iran”. Why would any country in the world sign such an agreement with the United States, and make the hard concessions, if they thought that a reckless president might simply discard that agreement a few years later?

Zarif said Iran attaches great importance to traditional friendly ties with China and is willing to have cooperation with China in infrastructure and connectivity within the framework of the Belt and Road Initiative. Trump called the deal unfair and doubted that it would limit the nuclear ambitions of Tehran.

Lavrov, for his part, said Russian Federation and Europe had a duty to “jointly defend their legal interests” in terms of the deal.

Zarif said that the agreement benefits all its signatories and the illegal withdrawal from the United States should not affect the rest.

Downing Street said Prime Minister Theresa May phoned the US President to stress that the United Kingdom will remain “firmly committed” to the worldwide agreement that he has condemned. How the United States can counter that is a puzzle, because Obama gave away much of the leverage we once had. He added, “this is just a moment that we’re not on the same page”.