Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said on Thursday that Iran will not negotiate under \u201cintimidation\u201d as he held crunch talks with the UN nuclear chief weeks before US President-elect Donald Trump takes office. International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) chief Rafael Grossi said achieving \u201cresults\u201d in nuclear talks with Iran was vital to avoid a new conflict in the region already inflamed by Israel\u2019s operations against Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon. His visit comes just days after Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz said Iran was \u201cmore exposed than ever to strikes on its nuclear facilities\u201d giving Israel \u201cthe opportunity to achieve our most important goal\u201d. Grossi said Iranian nuclear installations \u201cshould not be attacked\u201d but Trump is expected to give Israel a far freer rein after he takes office in January. The IAEA chief described his meeting with Araghchi as \u201cindispensable\u201d in a post on X. Araghchi was Iran\u2019s chief negotiator in talks that led to a landmark 2015 nuclear deal with major powers, abandoned three years later by Trump. Araghchi posted that their meeting was \u201cimportant & straightforward\u201d. He said Iran was \u201cwilling to negotiate\u201d based on the \u201cnational interest\u201d and \u201cinalienable rights,\u201d but was not \u201cready to negotiate under pressure and intimidation\u201d. \u201cWe agreed to proceed with courage and goodwill. Iran has never left the negotiation table on its peaceful nuclear programme,\u201d he said. Grossi also met the head of Iran\u2019s atomic energy organisation, Mohammad Eslami. Eslami told a joint news conference that Iran would take \u201cimmediate countermeasures\u201d against any sanctions from the IAEA\u2019s board of governors. \u201cAny interventionist resolution in the nuclear affairs of the Islamic Republic of Iran will definitely be met with immediate countermeasures,\u201d Eslami said. Grossi\u2019s visit is his second to Tehran this year but his first since Trump\u2019s re-election. During his first term in the White House from 2017 to 2021, Trump adopted a policy called \u201cmaximum pressure\u201d which reimposed sweeping US economic sanctions that had been lifted under the 2015 deal. Search for solutions In response, Iran started to gradually roll back its commitments under the deal, which barred it from enriching uranium to above 3.65 per cent. The IAEA says Iran has significantly expanded its stocks of uranium enriched to 60pc, a level that has triggered international alarm as it is much closer to the 90pc level needed for a nuclear warhead. Iran has blamed the incoming US president for the standoff. \u201cThe one who left the agreement was not Iran, it was America,\u201d government spokeswoman Fatemeh Mohajerani said on Wednesday. \u201cMr Trump once tried the path of maximum pressure and saw that this path did not work.\u201d Trump\u2019s looming return to the White House in January has only added to international fears of an all-out conflict between Israel and Iran after the archfoes exchanged unprecedented direct attacks earlier this year. \u201cThe margins for manoeuvre are beginning to shrink,\u201d Grossi warned in an interview with AFP on Tuesday, adding that \u201cit is imperative to find ways to reach diplomatic solutions\u201d.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said on Thursday that Iran will not negotiate under \u201cintimidation\u201d as he held crunch talks with the UN nuclear chief weeks…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":21012,"comment_status":"registered_only","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-21011","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21011","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=21011"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21011\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/21012"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=21011"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=21011"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=21011"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}