On Tuesday 17 January, the secretary general of the European External Action Service, Helga Schmid, warned that the multilateral agreement on the Iranian nuclear programme could not be renegotiated.
“There is a misunderstanding that you can renegotiate this agreement. This cannot be done”, Schmid told a group of journalists, including from EUROPE. “It's a multilateral agreement, that cannot be renegotiated bilaterally.”, she added. In her view, there is “no willingness” to renegotiate the agreement among the six other countries that signed it – France, Germany, the United Kingdom, Russia, China and Iran.
The agreement was " the result of thorough negotiations and the best possible result was achieved, and those who negotiated it for so many years know this well”, Schmid stated. She added that it was now an agreement endorsed by the United Nations Security Council and that it “belongs to the entire international community”.
A diplomatic source from the EU added that “some may have misread the EU’s willingness to preserve this agreement and the level of unity on that between the EU, Russia and China”. The source underlined this by saying that the EU was united in its promise to respect the implementation of the agreement and that it was working “hand in hand with China and Russia on this”. The same source said that the EU had done some informal outreach with the future US administration in order to explain the agreement’s added value. The source also said that there had been many misunderstandings on the other side of the Atlantic about the agreement. “It's a multilateral agreement, if one side steps away from it, the others can do the same”, the source said, adding that the agreement was seen as “very important” because it had “averted a potential major crisis in a region running high with tensions.”.
Echoing the European words, Iran’s President Hassan Rohani told press in Tehran the same day that his country would not renegotiate the agreement. “The nuclear agreement is finished. It was approved by the Security Council and has become an international document. It is a multilateral agreement and there is no sense in wanting to renegotiate it”, he said. “When Donald Trump enters the White House, I don’t think anything will happen”, Rohani added.
In an interview published in German and British daily newspapers Bild and The Times on Monday, the future US president, Donald Trump, described the agreement as one of the worst agreements ever made and one of the most stupid, but he did not, however, say whether he would challenge it. (Original version in French by Camille-Cerise Gessant)