Free Republic

Nations that struck the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, except for the United States, meet on Monday in what many diplomats fear may prove a quixotic effort to keep the agreement alive after U.S. sanctions targeting Iranian oil exports resume in November. Ministers from Britain, China, France, Germany, Russia and Iran will gather in New York at 8 p.m. EDT on Monday (0000 GMT Tuesday) to grapple with U.S. President Donald Trump’s May 8 decision to withdraw from the deal and restore the full force of U.S. sanctions on Iran. Their delicate, and perhaps unrealistic, task is to build a case...

Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif on Friday accused the administration of US President Donald Trump of being a threat to the Middle East and to the international community. “It is true that there is a real threat to our region and to international peace and security: That threat is the Trump Administration’s sense of entitlement to destabilize the world along with rogue accomplices in our region,” Zarif wrote on Twitter. “The US must start acting like a normal state,” he added. …

A few new books are coming out as Fall releases and I fully expect headlines like the one above to be frequent as the authors head out on book tours. Case in point: former Secretary of State John Kerry. Both President Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo responded to Kerry’s admission of meeting with leaders of other countries and advising them to wait out Trump’s time in office. Needless to say, they rightfully called out Kerry for unprecedented behavior. So, Kerry has begun to personally attack President Trump in a schoolyard bully type of way.Though it may be...

Former Secretary of State John Kerry is being slammed for conducting shadow diplomacy with Iran after admitting to multiple meetings with Iranian officials behind the backs of Trump administration officials -- including over the scrapped nuclear deal. An administration official on Thursday told Fox News Kerry’s meetings are "shameful," pointing out what Iranian-backed militias are doing to kill and injure people in Syria, Iraq and Yemen. Other Republicans suggested it may not even be legal. “John Kerry is out giving advice to Iran about how to maneuver around what Donald Trump is doing; it's insidious,” Ari Fleischer, the former White...

Iran went to the United Nations’ highest court Monday in a bid to have U.S. sanctions lifted following President Donald Trump’s decision earlier this year to re-impose them, calling the move “naked economic aggression.” Iran filed the case with the International Court of Justice in July, claiming that sanctions the Trump administration imposed on May 8 breach a 1955 bilateral agreement known as the Treaty of Amity that regulates economic and consular ties between the two countries. At hearings that started Monday at the court’s headquarters in The Hague, Tehran asked judges at the world court to urgently suspend the...

An Iranian man charged in D.C. with conspiracy and other offenses was so incensed by a U.S. senator who participated in a New York rally against the Tehran regime last fall that he suggested to his alleged co-conspirator that the “motherf—” needs to be shot, according to documents unsealed on Monday. Majid Ghorbani and Ahmadreza Mohammadi-Doostdar stand accused of having collected data for the regime relating to Jewish organizations in Chicago and U.S.-based members of the exiled Iranian opposition group, Mujahideen-e Khalq (MEK). They did so, according to an FBI special agent’s affidavit, “for the purpose of enabling the government...

Total, France’s largest energy company, announced on Monday it was pulling out of a $4.8 billion (€4.1 billion) Iranian gas field project, after admitting it was extremely vulnerable to the threat of US penalties against those doing business with Iran. The French group was one of three major energy companies set to help supply the state-of-the-art technology needed to tap into South Pars, the world’s largest natural gas field shared by Iran and Qatar. However, after abandoning the 2015 Iran nuclear accord in May this year, the United States has said it will reimpose sanctions on Iran in two phases,...

President Trump’s decision to pull the US out of the 2015 nuclear accord with Iran and reimpose a raft of sanctions will hit a number of German and European businesses working in Iran. […] Germany’s Daimler was teaming up with two Iranian firms to assemble Mercedes-Benz trucks. Volkswagen also said last year it would seek to resume sales in Iran for the first time in 17 years, yet the scale of its US activities could force the jettisoning of those plans. German firms’ business with Iran amounted to $2.6 billion in exports 2016, to $3 billion last year. […] British...

Russia cannot compel Iranian forces to quit Syria, Moscow's ambassador to Tel Aviv said on Monday, rebuffing Israel's long-standing demand that it should work to ensure their total withdrawal from the country. "They are playing a very, very important role in our common and joint effort to eliminate terrorists in Syria," Ambassador Anatoly Viktorov told Israel's Channel 10 television in an interview. "That is why, for this period of time, we see as non-realistic any demands to expel any foreign troops from the entirety of the Syrian Arab Republic," he said. "We can talk with our Iranian partners very frankly...

Russia’s ambassador to Israel said in an interview Monday his country cannot force Iranian forces to withdraw from Syria, despite Israeli calls for Iran to withdraw from the country. Speaking with Channel 10 news, Anatoly Viktorov said the Iranians are “playing a very, very important role in our common and joint efforts to eliminate terrorists in Syria. Viktorov said Russia can talk to its “Iranian friends” about a full withdrawal from Syria, as Israel demands, but “we cannot force them.” “The Iranian presence in Syria… is fully legitimate according to the UN principles and the UN charter,” he added. He...

At a time when the Trump administration’s robust defense of Israel at the United Nations is shaking up an institution that has long been hostile to the Jewish state, the biggest bloc of developing nations at the U.N. has decided to bestow its presidency on the “State of Palestine.” The move looks likely to increase pressure on the U.S. and Israel in the U.N. General Assembly, where the U.S. already invariably loses Israel-related votes by heavily lopsided margins. There is no sovereign state of Palestine, but the self-rule Palestinian Authority chaired by Mahmoud Abbas has since 2012 enjoyed the status...

To Iranian President Rouhani: NEVER, EVER THREATEN THE UNITED STATES AGAIN OR YOU WILL SUFFER CONSEQUENCES THE LIKES OF WHICH FEW THROUGHOUT HISTORY HAVE EVER SUFFERED BEFORE. WE ARE NO LONGER A COUNTRY THAT WILL STAND FOR YOUR DEMENTED WORDS OF VIOLENCE & DEATH. BE CAUTIOUS!

Iran has filed a lawsuit against the United States alleging that Washington’s decision in May to impose sanctions after pulling out of a nuclear deal violates a 1955 treaty between the two countries, the International Court of Justice said on Tuesday. A State Department official said the application was without merit and the United States would fight it in the court. “While we cannot comment on the specifics, Iran’s application is baseless and we intend to vigorously defend the United States before the ICJ,” a State Department official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told Reuters. […] Iran said in...

The U.S. ambassador to Germany urged Berlin on Tuesday to stop Iran withdrawing large sums of cash from bank accounts in Germany to offset the effect of new U.S. sanctions imposed after Washington withdrew from a 2015 nuclear deal. Richard Grenell, a longtime critic of the accord, told the mass-circulation daily Bild that the U.S. government was extremely concerned about Tehran’s plans to transfer hundreds of millions of euros in cash to Iran. “We encourage the highest levels of the German government to intervene and stop the plan,” Grenell said. […] Bild first reported on Monday that German authorities were...

Indian refiners cut imports of Iranian oil last month as they started weaning their plants off crude from the country to avoid sanctions by the United States that are set to take effect in November. India’s monthly oil imports from Iran declined to 592,800 barrels per day (bpd) in June, down 16 percent from May, according to data from industry and shipping sources. The United States in May said it would reimpose the sanctions after withdrawing from a 2015 agreement with Iran, Russia, China, France, Germany, and Britain, where Tehran agreed to curb its nuclear activities in return for the...

He warned World War 3 would be the end of civlisation, and that should "restrain" world powers fron taking "dangerous steps". Relations between Russia and the West have plunged to Cold War lows amid tensions over Syria, Crimea, NATO build-ups and Sergei Skripal. Putin said pressure on Russia from the West will end when they realise they are "counter productive". And he said fears of mutally assured destruction from nuclear is forcing "powers to respect each other". He said: ""The understanding that a third world war could be the end of civilisation should restrain us from taking extreme steps on...

<p>BERLIN (AFP) - Leading German politicianson Tuesday called for the US ambassador to be expelled, after the staunch ally of Donald Trump was accused of meddling in domestic politics and aggravating already tense ties.</p> <p>Richard Grenell had taken up his diplomatic posting in Berlin on May 8, and immediately irked Germany when he tweeted on the same day that German companies should stop doing business with Iran as Trump quit the nuclear deal with the Islamic Republic.</p>

Berlin is “determined to do everything necessary” to preserve the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran despite the US pullout, Germany’s Foreign Minister Heiko Maas said while meeting US lawmakers at the start of his visit to Washington. “We don’t want any proliferation of nuclear weapons in our extended neighborhood,” Maas stressed. Having a deal, according to Maas, is better than not having one, and fearing that Iran would restart its uranium enrichment program. […] Earlier this month, Maas sharply criticized the US stance on Iran, calling it a “disappointment.” He added that Berlin was willing to “fight for our interests...

The EU’s foreign policy chief, Federica Mogherini, responded on to U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s speech on Iran, in which he vowed that Washington would impose unprecedented sanctions against Tehran following its withdrawal from the 2015 nuclear deal. In a statement quoted by AFP, Mogherini warned that there is “no alternative” to the Iran nuclear deal. “Secretary Pompeo’s speech has not demonstrated how walking away from the JCPOA has made or will make the region safer from the threat of nuclear proliferation or how it puts us in a better position to influence Iran’s conduct in areas outside the...

Chancellor Angela Merkel visits China on Thursday, seeking to close ranks with the world’s biggest exporting nation as US President Donald Trump shakes up explosive issues from trade to Iran’s nuclear deal. Finding a common strategy to ward off a trade war and keep markets open will be Merkel’s priority when she meets with President Xi Jinping, as Washington brandishes the threat of imposing punitive tariffs on aluminium and steel imports. “Both countries are in agreement that open markets and rules-based world trade are necessary. That’s the main focus of this trip,” Merkel’s spokeswoman Martina Fietz said in Berlin on...