“Nobody’s going to go home and say ‘we capitulated on everything, this is a lousy deal for my own constituents.’ That’s not the way negotiations work.”
Both Westmacott and German ambassador Peter Wittig warned that if the U.S. Congress blocked a deal by not enabling sanctions relief to take place, the international sanctions regime would collapse.
“If we were to walk away, or if the Congress were to make it impossible for the agreement to be implemented, then the international community would be pretty reluctant, frankly, to contemplate a ratcheting up further of the sanctions against Iran,” said Westmacott.
“Many of the emerging countries would consider Congress blocking this deal as a trigger to at least question the present sanctions regime,” said Wittig.
President Obama on Friday signed legislation giving Congress the ability to review a final deal, with the possibility of a subsequent vote against sanctions relief.
At the Atlantic Council event, Araud recalled that over the years between the election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the election of President Hasan Rouhani, all talks with Iran over the nuclear issue effectively stopped.
Although there had been plenty of meetings over that period, he said, “there was no negotiation.”
Typically during three hours of talks, Araud said, “the first hour was about Cyrus the Great, the second hour was about Mossadegh, and the third hour was about the rights of the Iranian people.”
Cyrus was the founder of Persia (and ironically, as a panelist pointed out on Tuesday, the king who allowed the ancient Jewish nation to return to Israel from its Babylonian exile.) Mohammad Mossadegh was an Iranian prime minister toppled in a 1953 coup in which the CIA was involved, according to official documents declassified in 2013.
(CNSNews)