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‘Window of opportunity will close’: France urges signing of nuclear deal

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French Foreign Minister Catherine Colonna: “There will not be a better accord to the one, which is on the table.” 

By Debbie Reiss, World Israel News

France’s newly appointed foreign minister on Tuesday warned that “the window of opportunity will close in a few weeks” to revive the tattered nuclear deal with Iran, saying there was no better accord for the Islamic Republic than the one currently on the table.

Catherine Colonna further warned in a speech to French parliamentarians that the upcoming midterm elections in the U.S. will all but end any hopes of closing a deal.

“Time is passing. Tehran must realize this,” Colonna said, according to remarks carried by the Reuters news agency.

“The window of opportunity will close in a few weeks. There will not be a better accord to the one which is on the table.”

She charged Iran with employing delaying tactics and disregarding previous agreements so that it could continue enriching uranium, and warned that the regime was hurtling towards becoming a threshold nuclear arms state.

Last week, U.S. special envoy for Iran Robert Malley warned that it “would take a matter of weeks” for Iran to have enough fissile material for a bomb.

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According to Malley, Iran had added more demands that “have nothing to do with the nuclear deal, things that they’ve wanted in the past.”

“The discussion that really needs to take place right now is not so much between us and Iran, although we’re prepared to have that; it’s between Iran and itself, that they need to come to a conclusion about whether they are now prepared to come back into compliance with the deal, if we’re prepared to do the same, and we’ve said we are,” he said.

Washington’s assessment, Malley said, is that Iran has not yet decided on a deal. “Whether they are interested or not, they’re going to have to decide sooner or later because at some point the deal will be a thing of the past.”

Malley claimed that the current crisis was inherited from the Trump administration’s “reckless” decision to withdraw from the deal in 2018. Malley insisted that the deal until then had been “working,” despite mountains of evidence provided by Israel that showed Tehran to be in direct breach of its terms.

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