Analysis: Why Russia is the big winner of the Iran deal fallout
Iran announced Wednesday that it would stop complying with certain elements of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, better known as the Iran nuclear deal, in 60 days if the remaining signatories did not find a way to make the deal more economically beneficial to Iran.
One of those remaining signatories met the news with a very different reaction than the others.
The announcement came a year after President Trump withdrew the United States from the deal — and subsequently reimposed sanctions that made it difficult for Iran to reap the benefits of remaining in the deal. The deal’s European signatories, France, Germany and Britain, which had tried to convince the Trump administration to keep the United States in the deal, are now caught between their ally, the United States, and the deal they very much want to keep alive.
“We urge the Iranians to think very long and hard before they break that deal,” Jeremy Hunt, British foreign secretary, said Wednesday, referring to Iran’s threat to hold onto excess uranium and heavy water stockpiles. “Today, nothing would be worse than Iran, itself, leaving this accord,” French Defense Minister Florence Parly told France’s BFMTV.
But Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, appearing in Moscow with Mohammad Javad Zarif, his Iranian counterpart, said, “The U.S. is to blame for the situation and it makes it difficult for both Iran to fulfill its obligations and … for the general state of the nuclear nonproliferation regime.”
It isn’t that Russia is particularly pleased about the latest developments — “Russia does not particularly want to see the agreement fall apart, not least because it has a stake in the diplomatic achievement of which it was part,” Matthew Rojansky, director of the Wilson Center’s Kennan Institute, wrote in an email — but rather that, of all parties involved, Russia has benefited the most from the sequence of events that began a year ago, when Trump announced that the United States was leaving the deal.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/analysis-why-russia-is-the-big-winner-of-the-iran-deal-fallout/ar-AAB5hYM?li=BBnbfcN
Putin's investment in Trump is paying dividends.
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