Paris
“The deal is not dead,” said French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian, speaking on France’s RTL radio. “There’s an American withdrawal from the deal, but the deal is still there.”
French President Emmanuel Macron — Europe’s leading interlocutor as it sought to persuade President Donald Trump not to abandon the deal — spoke with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani by phone on Wednesday.
“The French president emphasized the willingness of France to continue enforcing the Iran nuclear agreement in all respects,” said a statement from the Elysee Palace. “He underlined the importance that Iran do the same.”
Those sentiments were shared in other capitals backing the 2015 accord: Brussels, London, Berlin, Moscow and Beijing.
Rouhani has ordered his diplomats to engage with their European counterparts. However, he and other moderates who support the accord, and diplomacy more generally, are under pressure from staunch conservatives who have long opposed it.
“I don’t trust these three EU countries either,” Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, tweeted in English. “If the govt. wants to make a contract, they should ask for a guarantee, or else they will all do just as the U.S. did.”
When President Trump announced on Tuesday that the United States would be withdrawing from the deal — a signature achievement of President Barack Obama’s administration that placed limits on Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for lifting international sanctions — he complained that its sunset provisions did nothing to stop Iran from seeking nuclear weapons in the future.
“The agreement was so poorly negotiated that even if Iran fully complies, the regime can still be on the verge of a nuclear breakout in just a short period of time,” he said.
Administration officials who filled in the gaps of Trump’s announcement made clear that the United States plans a full return to pre-deal sanctions, with the potential for new measures, and that there is no plan to issue waivers or allow allies or favored companies to circumvent their full effect.
That means European companies and others that have moved into Iran since the deal took effect will have to choose between shutting down operations there or continuing to do business in defiance of the United States — and risk their access to the much larger U.S. market.
Among the firms that would be affected is Airbus, a European aviation consortium, which in 2016 won a $19 billion contract to provide 100 planes to national carrier Iran Air. It has delivered three planes so far. (U.S. aviation firm Boeing also won contracts worth about $20 billion.)
“We’re carefully analyzing the announcement and will be evaluating next steps consistent with our internal policies and in full compliance with sanctions and export control regulations,” a spokesman for Airbus said in a statement.
French oil giant Total is another major beneficiary of the Iran deal’s lifting of sanctions, securing a $2 billion agreement to develop the South Pars oil field, shared between Iran and Qatar.
“Today, for Total, is a historic day, the day we come back to Iran,” Patrick Pouyanne, Total’s chief executive, said at a signing ceremony in Tehran in July. Now that agreement is in doubt.
Pressures on European companies “are actually intended consequences,” according to a senior State Department official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity under department ground rules. With virtually no existing U.S. economic relationship with Iran, the official said, “secondary sanctions,” primarily affecting Europe and Asia, are among the best ways to squeeze Iran’s economy.
The United States used secondary sanctions to isolate Iran before the nuclear agreement, the official said. “That’s what we want to do again. It’s not about sanctioning foreign companies; it’s about using the leverage and engaging the way we did before.”
“The sanctions worked last time,” Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin told Fox News, and brought Iran to the bargaining table. The goal now is to partner with allies to push Iran to negotiate a new agreement that will cover nuclear activities as well as ballistic missiles and destabilizing Iranian activity in Syria, Yemen and beyond.
The administration took Macron’s Tuesday tweet saying he was prepared to “work together on a broader framework,” covering all of Iran’s bad behavior, as evidence “that France is eager to be part of an effort” to pressure Iran, the State Department official said.
However, after the new U.S. ambassador to Germany, Richard Grenell, tweeted that “German companies doing business in Iran should wind down operations immediately,” Bruno Le Maire, France’s finance minister, fired back that the United States should not consider itself the world’s “economic policeman.”