No one will trust U.S. if Trump ends nuclear deal: Rouhani
Iranian President Hassan Rouhani has said that no one will trust the U.S. again if President Donald Trump quits the 2015 nuclear deal.
“The exiting of the United States from such an agreement would carry a high cost, meaning that subsequent to such an action by the United States of America, no one will trust America again,” Rouhani told NBC News in an interview aired on Tuesday.
Rouhani said every single word of the nuclear deal has been drafted carefully.
“Every word was analyzed many times by countries involved before its ratification, so if the United States were to not adhere to the commitments and trample upon this agreement, this will mean that it will carry with it the lack of subsequent trust from countries towards the United States because the greatest capital that any country has is trust and credibility,” he added.
The president added that if the U.S. pulls out of the nuclear deal, officially known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, Iran’s commitments “would no longer exist” and it would be free to pursue a new path.
“One of the options and choices were one of our counterparts not to remain in the current framework would be to go back to previous activities,” Rouhani said. “This is one option. And that's not difficult. We can easily go back to previous conditions if counterparts were to not live up to their commitments. But you do know fairly well that Iran will not be the initiator of this return to that path.”
But he stressed that Iran would resume “peace activities only”.
“So we will never go towards production of nuclear weapons, just as in the past we never intended to go towards that path nor did we ever. It has always been peaceful.”
Commenting on Iran’s missile program, Rouhani said that it fell outside the nuclear agreement and that his country would never sacrifice its “defensive missile capabilities”.
In his speech at the UN General Assembly, Donald Trump called the nuclear agreement an embarrassment and hinted that he may not recertify the agreement when it comes up for a mid-October deadline.
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