TEHRAN, Iran (AP) — A prominent member of Iran’s powerful Guardian Council has told The Associated Press that the Islamic Republic should stop honoring all terms of the collapsing 2015 nuclear deal with world powers amid tensions with the United States.
The comments by Abbas Ali Kadkhodaei show an increasing willingness among Iran’s hard-liners to use the country’s atomic program to pressure Western powers.
Nonproliferation experts are already concerned that steps Tehran has taken over the past months away from the accord narrow the estimated year it would need to build a nuclear bomb, if it chose to pursue one.
Yet Iran still allows United Nations inspectors to monitor its nuclear sites and hasn’t pushed its enrichment anywhere near weapons-grade levels of 90%.
Completely abandoning the deal as Kadkhodaei suggests could lead to an immediate confrontation. Israel, which has bombed Iraq and Syria in the past to stop their atomic programs, repeatedly has warned it won’t allow Iran to build a nuclear weapon.
“I think those who disrupted the game should be punished since they damaged other parties’ interests,” Kadkhodaei said in an interview with the AP in Tehran on Saturday.
Kadkhodaei serves on the 12-member Guardian Council, a panel of six clerics appointed by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and six jurists nominated by Iran’s hard-line judiciary approved by its parliament. The Guardian Council approves all parliamentary and presidential candidates and must agree to all legislation passed by parliament before it becomes law.
That grants the body, which Kadkhodaei has served on intermittently since 2001, tremendous power in the political life of the Islamic Republic. It has also never allowed a woman to run for president and blocks candidates calling for dramatic changes to the Islamic Republic.
The Guardian Council in 2015 approved the nuclear deal, which saw Iran limit its enrichment of uranium in exchange for the lifting of economic sanctions. Iranians celebrated in the streets of Tehran, hopeful the deal between their relatively moderate President Hassan Rouhani and then-President Barack Obama meant Iran might normalize relations with the West after decades of enmity.
But President Donald Trump withdrew from the accord in May 2018, saying the deal didn’t go far enough to stop Iran’s ballistic missile program and what he described as Tehran’s malign influence across the wider Mideast.
