by WorldTribune Staff, July 24, 2019
The Boris Johnson government will likely withdraw Great Britain from the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, a member of UK parliament said.
Matthew Offord, an MP of the Conservative party, told i24News on July 23 that he believes Johnson will follow U.S. President Donald Trump’s lead and withdraw from the deal, or Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).
“We’ve now got to face that the nuclear deal is all but dead,” Offord told i24NEWS.
Johnson on July 23 won the race to become Britain’s next prime minister, defeating current Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt by a margin of 66 percent to 34 percent.
Trump withdrew from the Iran deal last May and later imposed two rounds of sanctions that have devastated Iran’s economy.
Related: Israel’s military ‘only one in the world to fight Iran’; Changing of the guard at IAEA, July 23, 2019
The European signatories to the 2015 deal – including Great Britain – did not agree with Trump’s decision to leave the agreement and vowed to help Iran evade the economic sanctions imposed by the U.S., shielding companies doing business with the rogue state in an effort to preserve the deal, Artuz Sheva noted in a July 24 report.
Last week, Iran warned the European Union that it is prepared to end all of its commitments under the 2015 deal and restore its nuclear program to where it placed no limits on any areas of nuclear development.
Iran recently announced that it had exceeded the amount of enriched uranium permitted under the deal and had begun to enrich uranium to 5 percent purity instead of the 3.67 percent limit imposed under the JCPOA.
Offord suggested that renegotiating a new nuclear deal might be the best way to solve the current situation without diverting to direct confrontation.
A new deal “can be a way forward by looking at what we can provide the Iranian regime without them losing face, but ensuring that they ratchet down their actions,” Offord said, adding that there is a need to reign in Iranian actions in the wider Middle East.
Offord also said Britain is not seeking any sort of military confrontation after Iran’s capture of a British oil tanker in the Persian Gulf last week, but said there is a need for Britain to be “very firm” with Iran.
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