French President Emmanuel Macron had convened key ministers and experts on Wednesday to discuss Iran, including its nuclear program amid growing tensions between Tehran and US President Donald Trump, three diplomatic sources said.
Trump urged Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to immediately engage in negotiations and threatened Iran with bombing and secondary tariffs if he failed to get caught up in a deal over a nuclear program over bombing and secondary tariffs on Sunday.
Diplomatic sources said French, British and German ministers wanted to discuss Iranian papers with US Secretary of State Marco Rubio when they convened in Brussels for this week’s NATO ministerial meeting.
Trump has withdrawn the US from a 2015 contract between Iran and the world’s great powers, which imposed strict restrictions on Tehran’s nuclear activities in exchange for sanctions relief. Trump also reimposed the sanctions that he wiped out.
Since then, Iran has far surpassed this trade limit on uranium enrichment.
France, the UK and Germany have been calling for pressure on Iran in recent months to bring it back to debate over the nuclear program.
They held several consultations with Iran at the technical level last week, trying to lay the foundation for some form of agreement.
But the Trump administration initially focused on a campaign of “maximum pressure” and Europeans found adjustments to be complicated, diplomats say.
The European powers wanted to persuade Iran to begin negotiating new restrictions on nuclear activity, considering it would be trading by the latest August.
This gives enough time to set new restrictions on Iranian programs and lift sanctions before the 2015 agreement expires in October 2025.
(The European party for nuclear deals in 2015 has refused to lift financial and economic sanctions on Iran since Trump resigned from the joint comprehensive plan of action in May 2018 and officially resigned from the contract. Iran remains fully loyal to the full annual nuclear deal, giving Europeans time to respect their commitment. The European party that trades is passive and obedient to the United States, and has done nothing so far.)