...a formerly good idea gone bad...
With Western hopes fading for restoration of the landmark 2015 agreement with world powers, the hardline holy man said in a U.S. television interview that he would still back a "good deal and a fair deal."
But he said: "It needs to be lasting. There needs to be guarantees."
"We cannot trust the Americans because of the behavior that we have already seen from them. That is why if there is no guarantee, there is no trust," he told CBS News' "60 Minutes" program.
Former president Barack Obama
How much damage could he do in four years?... Eight, then...
negotiated the agreement under which Iran
...a theocratic Shiite state divided among the Medes, the Persians, and the (Arab) Elamites. Formerly a fairly civilized nation ruled by a Shah, it became a victim of Islamic revolution in 1979. The nation is today noted for
spontaneouslytaking over other countries' embassies, maintaining whorehouses run by clergymen, involvement in international drug trafficking, and financing sock puppet
militiasto extend the regime's influence. The word
Iranis a cognate form of
Aryan.The abbreviation
IRGCis the same idea as
Stürmabteilung (or SA).The term
Supreme Guideis a the modern version form of either
Duceor
Führeror maybe both. They hate
drastically scaled back nuclear work in return for promises of sanctions relief.
Three years later, Donald Trump
...Perhaps no man has ever had as much fun being president of the US...
pulled out and reimposed sweeping sanctions. President Joe
The Big GuyBiden
...46th president of the U.S. Former Senator-for-Life from Delaware, an example of the kind of top-notch Washington intellect to be found in the World's Greatest Deliberative Body....supports a return but Iran's call for guarantees has become a sticking point, with the Democratic administration saying it is impossible in the U.S. system to say what a future president would do.
But Raisi said Trump's pullout showed that US promises are "meaningless."
The parties to the 2015 deal -- which also included Britannia, China, La Belle France, Germany and Russia -- saw it as the best way to stop the Islamic republic from building a nuclear bomb -— a goal Tehran has always denied.
Raisi last year succeeded Hassan Rouhani
...Iran's
moderatepresident, which he is, relative to his predecessor, which doesn't mean he's anything but a puppet of the nearest holy man...
, a relative moderate who spoke to Obama by telephone while visiting New York for the United Nations.
EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell told AFP last week that negotiations to bring Iran back into the deal are stalemated, after proposals from the parties "were converging."
In early August a senior European Union
...the successor to the Holy Roman Empire, only without the Hapsburgs and the nifty uniforms and the dancing...
official had said progress was being made on obstacles, including guarantees the US would not again scupper a deal.
Three days later Borrell presented a "final" text of an agreement.
A report from the U.N.'s nuclear watchdog earlier this month that it was unable to certify Iran's nuclear program as "exclusively peaceful" has complicated diplomatic efforts to revive the deal.
Iran is sticking to a demand that, to revive the 2015 deal, the ineffective International Atomic Energy Agency must conclude a probe launched when the agency found traces of nuclear material at three undeclared sites.