TEHRAN – Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi says Tehran remains unconvinced that the United States is prepared to engage in genuine and serious negotiations over the future of nuclear talks, while reaffirming that Tehran is ready to resume dialogue if the United States adopts a fair and balanced approach.
In an interview with Japan’s Kyodo News, Araghchi said Iran is open to diplomacy but only under fair and balanced terms. “If they change their approach and are ready for a fair, bilateral negotiation, we are also prepared,” he stated. “But negotiation is different from dictation. For now, we are not convinced that they are ready for a real and serious dialogue.”
Araghchi said the core dispute centers on Washington’s refusal to acknowledge Iran’s right to peaceful nuclear technology under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), including uranium enrichment. He noted that Japan is a signatory to the treaty, while Israel has never joined it.
Despite these differences, Araghchi said Tehran is willing to accept limits on enrichment levels and the types of centrifuges it operates. He added that talks could advance quickly if the U.S. recognized Iran’s peaceful nuclear program and lifted sanctions.
When the U.S. President Trump withdrew from the 2015 nuclear agreement—under which Iran accepted restrictions on its nuclear activities in exchange for sanctions relief—he reimposed sanctions and announced that they would only be lifted if Iran accepted a new deal dismantling its nuclear program entirely. Instead, Iran accelerated and expanded its nuclear activities.
Now, following the war Israel initiated in June with the support of Washington, Trump insists that Iran must not only renounce nuclear weapons but also sever ties with “Resistance” groups and limit the range of its missiles. Iranian officials have again rejected these demands.
On Sunday, the spokesperson for Iran’s Foreign Ministry said the United States must fundamentally revise its approach if it seeks meaningful negotiations with Tehran, noting that “changing long-standing habits is often difficult or even impossible.” He added that Washington has a “very long record of interference in Iran’s internal affairs,” and that Iran’s experience shows U.S. calls for “reasonable negotiations” often amount to “dictation rather than dialogue.”
Araghchi also addressed the impact of recent military escalations, saying Iran had been engaged in talks with the United States when Israel launched a sudden attack. Israel’s June 13 operation killed senior Iranian commanders, nuclear scientists, and civilians. More than a week later, the United States joined the conflict by bombing three Iranian nuclear sites.
According to Araghchi, the sites were “bombarded, destroyed, and severely damaged,” an action he described as “perhaps the greatest violation of international law” ever committed against an IAEA-monitored facility.
He said the attacks exposed a significant gap in IAEA procedures concerning the inspection and assessment of peaceful nuclear installations damaged by military strikes.
Earlier this year, Iran and the IAEA agreed on a cooperation framework during talks in Cairo to establish mechanisms for inspecting and stabilizing such facilities. But Araghchi said this progress was undermined when the United States and the three European members of the JCPOA moved to restore previous UN Security Council sanctions on Iran.
The foreign minister also called on Japan to share its technical expertise, citing its firsthand experience with nuclear incidents including Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and the 2011 Fukushima disaster. This cooperation, he said, could help Iran secure nuclear facilities damaged in the recent attacks by Israel and the United States.
Araghchi emphasized that any collaboration with Japan would focus purely on technical safety. Inspections, he said, remain the responsibility of the International Atomic Energy Agency. “In the technical dimension of these safety challenges, cooperation with Japan would be very beneficial,” he stated.
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