Tillerson said that as of Tuesday, Iran was complying with its responsibilities under the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, which it agreed to in 2015 after negotiations with the U.S., Britain, France, China, Russia and Germany.
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson declared the Iran nuclear deal a failure on Wednesday but left open the possibility the Trump administration would uphold it nonetheless.
Speaking to reporters, Tillerson said: "The Trump administration is now conducting across the entire government a review of our Iran policy". Secretary of State Rex Tillerson confirmed late Tuesday that Iran is now abiding by the terms of the multilateral deal-one that involves all five permanent members of the UN Security Council. But reimposing sanctions that were explicitly tied to Iran's nuclear program - as Tillerson suggested in his announcement - would face particular opposition from European allies and give the government in Tehran grounds to walk away from the accord.
Critics of the agreement, including Israel, have argued that when some of the terms of the deal expire in 10 and 15 years it will leave Tehran on the threshold of building a bomb.
Tillerson's Wednesday comments echoed those by then-national security adviser Mike Flynn shortly after Trump took office, when he told reporters the administration was putting Iran "on notice", and administration officials told reporters that a review of Iran policy was underway.
But Tillerson added that the current administration would evaluate whether the lifting of sanctions that had been placed on Iran "is vital to the national security interests of the United States".
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Opponents of the deal, including Israel, objected, saying it only delayed Iran's pursuit of nuclear weapons and did not allow for the kind of inspections of its atomic sites that would guarantee it was not cheating. "The U.S. would be isolated from the rest of the world". It did not address Iran's alleged support of terrorism or its dismal human rights record, but focused on its commitment not to build a nuclear weapon for at least a decade and to open its facilities to United Nations inspections.
"The administration is doing an Iran review, but from what we hear the focus is more about what happens as parts of the deal expire, as opposed to actually opening the agreement up for renegotiation", the second diplomat said. "I think that the issue of the agreement on the Iranian nuclear program has surfaced in the general negative chorus of statements related to Russian Federation". Those sanctions badly hurt the Iranian economy, particularly limiting its ability to sell oil on the global market, and led to almost two years of hard-fought negotiations before the two sides reached an agreement.
The agreement was effectively dead before Trump took office after Congress refused to ratify it.
He also said he thought the threshold for any USA withdrawal from the JCPOA would be "quite high", given that it could have "very significant diplomatic consequences" for Washington.
On Wednesday, however, he detailed Iran's "alarming and ongoing provocations that export terror and violence, destabilizing more than one country at a time", and said that if Iran goes unchecked, it "has the potential to travel the same path as North Korea".
What is the Iran nuclear deal?
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