US says won't incentivize Iran to join JCPOA talks

The US once again asserts that it will not offer any "incentives" to prompt Iran to rejoin talks with Washington on "mutual compliance" with a 2015 nuclear agreement it unilaterally left later, insisting that it is Tehran that has to take the first step.

"We will not offer any unilateral gestures or incentives to induce the Iranians to come to the table,” State Department spokesman Ned Price told reporters on Thursday, Reuters said.

“If the Iranians are under the impression that, absent any movement on their part to resume full compliance with the [nuclear deal], …we will offer favors or unilateral gestures, well that's a misimpression," he added.

Under his signature “maximum pressure” policy against Iran, former American president Donald Trump withdrew Washington from a landmark nuclear accord between Iran and the P5+1 group of states – the US, the UK, France, Russia, and China plus Germany.

He then restored the economic sanctions that the deal had lifted. The US also began threatening third countries with “secondary sanctions” if they did business with Iran in defiance of the bans.

This is while the deal, officially known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), has been ratified as a United Nations Security Council resolution, making both the US’s departure from the accord and its snapping the sanctions back into place unilateral and illegal.

Iran, in turn, began confronting the sanctions under Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Khamenei’s Resistive Economy directive.

It also started a number of nuclear countermeasures on the first anniversary of the US’s withdrawal in line with its rights under the deal to retaliate for the other side’s non-commitment. The Islamic Republic gradually increased its counteractions as Washington and its allies in the deal would continue to violate their JCPOA obligations.

Price suggested that Washington could consider step-by-step resumption of each party’s nuclear commitments only after Tehran returned to the negotiation table.

“If and only if Tehran comes to the negotiating table, would we be in a position, would we be prepared to discuss proposals that would help push both sides back on that path of mutual compliance to the deal," he said. "Ultimately, that is where we seek to go: compliance for compliance," the spokesman added.

Iran has, on the one hand, underscored that, unlike the US, it was never the party to leave the talks in the first place. On the other, it notes that the JCPOA is a done deal and does not need any renegotiation.

As its definitive stance on the issue, the Islamic Republic also emphasizes that it will only resume its full compliance with the deal once the US lifted all the sanctions, noting that the sanction relief process is Washington’s contractual duty and should take place without any preconditions.

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