Tehran reacts to the collapse of Washington-Pyongyang nuclear talks

Tabnak – The latest summit between the leaders of the United States and North Korea hit a deadlock after the two sides could not find a common ground on the issue of Pyongyang’s denuclearization. Reacting to this development, Iranian foreign minister slams Washington for withdrawing from the 2015 nuclear deal with Tehran.

Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif says US President Donald Trump is not seeking "serious diplomacy" on North Korea after he failed to reach an agreement with the North Korean leader during their summit in Vietnam.

"President Trump should've now realized that pageantries, photo-ops & flip-flops don’t make for serious diplomacy," Zarif tweeted on Friday, a day after Trump, a self-proclaimed "dealmaker," cut short his summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un in the Vietnamese capital Hanoi as they failed to strike a denuclearization deal.

In his Twitter post, Zarif also once again defended the historic Iran nuclear agreement, officially known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), reached between Iran and the P5+1 group of countries in 2015.

“It took 10yrs of posturing plus two years-literally thousands of hours-of negotiations to hammer out every word of the 150 page JCPOA. You'll never get a better deal,” he added in his tweet.

In May 2018, the US president pulled his country out of the JCPOA, the nuclear deal that was achieved in Vienna in 2015 after years of negotiations among Iran and the Group 5+1 (Russia, China, the US, Britain, France and Germany).

Trump on August 6 signed an executive order re-imposing many sanctions on Iran, three months after pulling out of the Iran nuclear deal. He said the US policy is to levy “maximum economic pressure” on the country. The second batch of US sanctions against the Islamic Republic took effect on November 4.

Meanwhile, North Korea says it had expressed readiness to the US during talks in Vietnam to fully dismantle its nuclear program in exchange for a partial removal of sanctions, contradicting Trump’s assertion that Pyongyang demanded a full sanctions removal before a complete denuclearization.

Following the collapse of his second summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un in Hanoi on Thursday, Trump told reporters at a press conference that he “had to walk away” from the negotiations because Kim insisted on the removal of all sanctions as a prerequisite to denuclearization.

North Korean Foreign Minister Ri Yong-ho, however, offered a starkly different breakdown of the summit, telling reporters in a separate presser that Pyongyang never asked for the removal of all sanctions.

However, China says it hopes the US and North Korea will keep talking. China is Pyongyang's sole major ally and Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Lu Kang said in Beijing Thursday that he had yet to hear what Trump or the North Korean leader had to say about the meeting.

“But I have always hoped that everyone can realize that the nuclear problem on the Korean Peninsula has been going on for many years, and that solving this problem is definitely not something that can be achieved overnight,” Lu said.

In their first meeting, Trump and Kim broadly agreed to work toward the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, but while North Korea took several measures to show goodwill, the US refused to offer sanctions relief.