Iran's Zarif: US carrot-and-stick policy not effective anymore

Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif says the United States’ former means of trying to bend other nations to its will is not effectual anymore due to the unreliability of the course of action.

“The carrot-and-stick approach is used for animals not for human beings. It has always produced the unintended consequences,” Zarif told Russia Today on Thursday.

The approach that features enticing others with sugarcoated proposals, but always going back on the original promises, has been exhausted throughout the history by Washington against the nations towards which it is hostile.

Observers point out how each American administration has tried its hand at a new form of the approach towards the Islamic Republic instead of treating the Iranian nation with respect. The former administration of president Donald Trump, however, took the policy to surprising extremes.

It took Washington out of a 2015 nuclear deal with Iran and returned the economic sanctions that the accord had lifted. The administration then asked Tehran for unprecedented concessions and fresh negotiations on what was already a “done deal” before it would lift the sanctions again -- another promise by Washington that had already broken its pledge of committing to the nuclear deal.

‘US loser of its own maximum pressure policy’

Zarif reminded that the policy of unilateral sanctions was a policy of economic warfare “or even worse economic terrorism” because it puts pressure on people so they start pressuring their government in turn.

However, “this never works,” the top Iranian diplomat noted.

He went on to explain how the policy that the Trump team started leading under the “maximum pressure” strategy had failed to “bring Iran to its knees” as it had intended to.

Zarif pointed to the nuclear countermeasures that Iran began in May 2019 to retaliate for the US non-commitments.

As a result of the countermeasures, Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium has grown from 300 kilograms to 4,000 today, he said.

Before Washington left the deal, Iran was only using the IR-1 centrifuge machines “with very small ability to enrich uranium,” the minister said. Now, “we are building our IR-6 machines with almost 20 times the ability of the IR-1s,” he added.

“So, they’re the ones who lost at the end of the day if they were trying to limit the Iranian enrichment capability,” Zarif concluded.

‘US needs to change tack’

The US, therefore, needed to change its approach, Zarif said. “The United States can change its policy. Now it’s the time for the Biden administration to abandon a policy, not because of the goodness of their hearts, but because of the fact that, that policy has failed,” he added, referring to the administration of Trump’s successor Joe Biden.

“Anybody in their right mind would try to change that failed approach,” the top diplomat also quipped.

Iran will only respond to actions, not words: Zarif to US

Zarif says it is Washington’s actions that Iran takes as its yardstick, not its words.

Zarif, meanwhile, spurned any notion that the nuclear deal, officially known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), could be bettered in any way as the former American administration used to demand.

“I don’t think they’ll find a better comprehensive deal because had it been possible to do a comprehensive deal, we would have done it five years ago before all these negative atmospherics that were caused by the Trump administration,” he said.

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