TEHRAN — Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir Abdollahian who is in the United States for bilateral and multilateral consultations gave an interview to IRNA correspondent in New York, which was published on Friday.

During the interview, Amir Abdollahian shed some light on the United States’ response to the EU proposal, stating that Iran “strengthened” the response, which was interpretable in many ways.

According to the foreign minister, the American side took more than eight to nine days to review the text and provide its comments. 

“After we received the opinions of the American side, we saw that in some issues that are key and fundamental for us, the text of the American side can be interpreted and create some ambiguity in the text in those issues,” he said. 

The foreign minister noted that in its response given to EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell, Iran tried to “strengthen” this text in such a way that the balance in the text won’t change.

“We tried not to change the balance and the content. The framework of the agreement that we have should be maintained, but this text should have been strengthened by maintaining our red lines. One of the dimensions of this strengthening was ‘clarification’ so that when the text is published, 10 interpretations of a single text would not come out, but at least, the majority of the readers of that text should feel that they have a single understanding of that text. Moreover, more important than that text for us is the implementation of agreements,” Amir Abdollahian clarified. 

What the Americans had done to the text was to make it interpretable, Iran’s top diplomat noted, stating that multiple interpretations were extracted from the text.

“They took the text and, according to that text, in some clauses, added conditions and provided more explanations. In some cases that I cannot reveal the details, their additional explanation was exactly in conflict with the first two lines of the same paragraph. We tried to bring this to a point where everyone has a single understanding of this text, based on what was done in the exchange of messages between us and the American side with the coordination of the European Union,” he noted. 

The most important thing according to Amir Abdollahian is that, eventually, Iran is looking for an agreement that works well and all parties to the JCPOA feel that the agreement that has been formed, “if there is a real will to implement it, with a common understanding to implement it.” 

According to the foreign minister, the details of the agreement have been verbally agreed between Iran and other parties, including the Americans.
However, he noted, “We definitely emphasize having a strong text, and the element of time is an important issue, but not at the price of crossing our red line.”

He then reaffirmed Iran’s seriousness in reaching an agreement, stating that Tehran will not hesitate to reach a good, strong and stable agreement. 

“We will continue our efforts; we will not leave the negotiating table, and it is the American side that must show now, does it have the necessary courage to make a decision on this issue or not?” Amir Abdollahian asked.