Iran’s leaders announced late Sunday that the country will no longer abide by the 2015 nuclear deal it inked with the Obama Administration after a strategic airstrike in Baghdad killed the head of its violent Quds Force, Gen. Qassem Soleimani.
The rogue nation, Fox News reports, told European officials that it remains open to negotiating with the European Union and other nations, but will abandon several “key provisions” of the agreement that limit how much uranium Iran is allowed to stockpile as it pursues nuclear weapons.
“The government of the Islamic Republic of Iran has in a statement announced its fifth and final step in reducing Iran’s commitments under the JCPOA,” Iranian state-run television reported Sunday night, using the official acronym for the 2015 agreement. “The Islamic Republic of Iran no longer faces any limitations in operations.”
“Iran’s state TV cited a statement by President Hassan Rouhani’s administration saying the country will not observe limitations on its enrichment, the amount of stockpiled enriched uranium as well as research and development in its nuclear activities,” according to Fox News.
In a contemporaneous missive, Iranian officials again threatened retaliatory action for Soleimani’s death, suggesting that the country plans to attack U.S. troops stationed abroad, but, this time, adding that it believes Israel and Israeli interest are also fair targets.
Although Iran’s departure from the nuclear deal was treated as a major development by most mainstream news organizations, it has never been clear that Iran was abiding by the limitations placed on it by the Obama Administration, or that Iran had abandoned its pursuit of nuclear weapons following the 2015 meetings. At best, it seems, Iran considered its nuclear ambitions delayed and the provisions ordering the shutdown of Iran’s nuclear centrifuges and uranium enrichment operation mere suggestions.
The United States, under President Donald Trump, withdrew from the 2015 Iran deal back in 2018, citing a number of violations on the part of Iran’s leadership, even though the IAEA, which monitors rogue nations’ development, storage, and use of “weapons of mass destruction” disagreed with the Trump Administration’s assessment of Iran’s nuclear capabilities.
As if to prove Trump right, just one year later, Iran’s leadership withdrew from several key provisions of the 2015 deal, announcing in June of 2019 that the country planned to increase the amount of enriched uranium it had on hand in spite of the deal’s limitations.
“We will go further from that ceiling, not only that but we will also increase production drastically. After we pass the limit of 300 kg, the pace and the speed of enriched uranium production at the lower rate will also increase,” the head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization said last year.
Iran then said European nations could forestall the development if they gave Iran access to global markets and allowed it to trade. European nations, of course, said no.
Since then, it’s been unclear how determined Iran was at abiding by any of the agreement’s limitations.
On Sunday, Iranian officials simply jettisoned the agreement altogether, making those questions moot. Several members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard were also clear, Sunday, that the universe of Iran’s potential targets has expanded to include Israel, whom the Iranians blame for obtaining and leaking information about Soleimani’s whereabouts.
“Rest assured we will level to the ground Haifa and Israeli centers so that Israel will be wiped out,” the leader of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard said in an address to mourners gathered in Tehran Sunday evening. “The issue is very serious for the Iranian nation. You hit us and you should get hit. You attacked us and it is the Iranian nation’s right.”