Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani has dismissed UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s call for a new “Trump deal” to replace the 2015 nuclear agreement.
Mr Johnson said he recognised that Mr Trump saw the accord as “flawed” and suggested he could renegotiate it.
Mr Rouhani warned that “all Trump has done is break promises”.
He also criticised the UK, France and Germany for triggering the nuclear deal’s dispute mechanism after Iran breached key commitments.
President Trump abandoned the nuclear deal in 2018 and reinstated US sanctions on Iran to try to force it to negotiate a new agreement that would place indefinite curbs on its nuclear programme and also halt its development of ballistic missiles.
The five remaining parties to the deal – the European powers plus China and Russia – want to keep it alive. But the sanctions have caused Iran’s oil exports to collapse, the value of its currency to plummet, and sent its inflation rate soaring.
After the Trump administration increased the pressure on Iran in May 2019, the country responded by gradually lifting all limits on its production of enriched uranium, which can be used to make reactor fuel but also nuclear weapons.
Iran announced that the final limit had been lifted earlier this month, days after top Iranian general Qasem Soleimani was killed in a US drone strike in Iraq. Iran’s armed forces also fired ballistic missiles at two Iraqi bases housing US forces in retaliation.