China said it would host nuclear talks with Iran and Russia, days after US President Donald Trump urged Tehran to negotiate a new deal over its atomic work or face military action.
“The three parties will exchange views on the Iranian nuclear issue and other issues of mutual interest,” China’s Foreign Ministry said in a statement on Wednesday. The meeting will take place in Beijing on Friday and be attended by deputy foreign ministers from Moscow and Tehran, it said.
The summit comes amid a flurry of diplomatic activity on Iran’s expanding nuclear program. The International Atomic Energy Agency said last month that Tehran’s uranium enrichment has surged since Trump’s election victory in November. While Iran insists its nuclear program is for civilian purposes only, the West has longstanding concerns that the country wants to develop atomic weapons.
Last week, Trump said he had written a letter to Iran’s leadership, urging it to enter talks on a new agreement. The US President walked away from an earlier deal during his first term in 2018 and little progress has been made since then to revive the accord.
Iran has signaled it’s not ready for talks with the US. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei says his country won’t be bullied into negotiations and that Trump’s decision to tear-up the original 2015 accord showed he cannot be trusted or taken seriously. Still, the country’s economic strains have led some senior officials to conclude that negotiations are needed to get sanctions eased.
Friday’s gathering in Beijing comes after two rounds of preliminary nuclear talks between Iranian and European diplomats in Geneva in recent months.
I’m sorry but why would any country give up its nuclear arsenal today? Very serious question.
We all know that the international rules based order doesn’t give a crap about any of that. Ukraine gave away its nuclear arsenal in the 90s in exchange for security guarantees from Russia, the US, the UK, and so on. And we’ve all seen how that went. (See Budapest Memorandum)
Israel has had a nuclear arsenal for decades and no one seems to make such a big fuss about it.
Iraq got invaded by the US in an illegal war under false premises that they were building WMDs. Now we know that even the US government knew at the time that those claims were bullshit.
So again, why would any country capable of building nuclear weapons not do so? Give me a list of actual incentives.
That’s bad and all, but I can’t blame them
Trump’s decision to tear-up the original 2015 accord showed he cannot be trusted or taken seriously
Yeah, funny that.
