Islam Times - Iran’s Zarif: Warsaw meeting a failure in advance

Islam Times - Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif says a United States-planned meeting in the Polish capital, Warsaw, that Washington had sought to turn into an anti-Iran platform has fallen flat on its face before getting off the ground.

“The Warsaw meeting was rendered doomed to failure before [its] start,” Foreign Minister Zarif told ICANA, referring to the February 13-14 meeting.

The United States initially put much effort into making the Warsaw meeting an anti-Iran platform but had to back away from many of its suppositions about the meeting because it was snubbed by most world officials.

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced the meeting last month, saying it would purportedly focus on the “important element of making sure that Iran is not a destabilizing influence.”

Later in the month, however, and as officials from various countries indicated their refusal to participate, US Deputy Ambassador to the United Nations Jonathan Cohen told the UN Security Council that the meeting was “not a venue to demonize or attack Iran,” in an apparent about-face.

Zarif said, “The US is trying to somehow compensate for the atmosphere that has been created against it. Therefore, it seems the summit will not be taking place in the format that the Americans would have wanted it to.”

The administration of US President Donald Trump has adopted an increasingly antagonistic posture against Iran. Trump and his close associates have been making strong-worded statements about the Islamic Republic ever since he took office in 2017.

Last May, the Trump White House unilaterally left a multinational nuclear accord between Iran and other world countries. The withdrawal came even as the deal has been ratified in the form of a Security Council resolution. The White House also reinstated the nuclear-related sanctions that had been lifted by the accord.

The other parties to the deal, including European countries, have nevertheless stayed in the deal with Iran, defying US expectations to abandon it.