Iran’s envoy to the United Nations has said that the treaty serving as the linchpin for curbing the spread of nuclear weapons has been used to spark conflict rather than promote peace following strikes from the United States and Israel against the Islamic Republic.
In a statement delivered Sunday to the U.N. Security Council and shared with Newsweek, Iranian Permanent Representative to the U.N. Amir Saeid Iravani said the “pattern is evident” in observing what he viewed to be the exploitation and misuse of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT).
“The NPT, a cornerstone of the non-proliferation regime, has been manipulated into a political weapon,” Iravani said. “Instead of guaranteeing parties’ legitimate rights to peaceful nuclear energy, it has been exploited as a pretext for aggression and unlawful action that jeopardize the supreme interests of my country.”
Iran, which Iravani described as “a responsible party to the UN Charter and the NPT and a non-nuclear weapon state,” has always denied seeking nuclear weapons.
Israel and the U.S. have challenged this premise, citing Iran’s decision to significantly ramp up uranium enrichment beyond levels required for peaceful purposes.
Iravani took aim at the U.S. as “a permanent member of this Council, the depository of the NPT, and the only state that has ever used nuclear weapons,” as well as Israel, as “an outlaw nuclear-armed regime that refuses to join the NPT despite Security Council Resolution 487.”
He warned that, in the wake of these attacks and past Israeli strikes against nuclear sites elsewhere in the Middle East, “there is no assurance that other NPT members will not face similar aggression.”
The remarks came a day after President Donald Trump ordered an unprecedented series of U.S. strikes late Saturday against three key Iranian nuclear facilities in Isfahan, Fordow and Natanz. For more than a week prior, Israel had been launching sweeping raids targeting sites and personnel ties to Iran’s nuclear program and military, drawing retaliatory Iranian missile and drone attacks.
Iravani’s comments also came as Ebrahim Rezaei, spokesperson for the Iranian parliament’s National Security and Foreign Policy Committee, revealed Sunday that lawmakers were weighing Tehran’s withdrawal from the NPT in response to the attacks conducted by the U.S. and Israel.
To date, the only NPT accessor state to have withdrawn from the treaty is North Korea, which did so in 2003, citing concerns over an impending U.S. preemptive strike. Pyongyang went on to conduct its first nuclear weapons test in 2006, while Tehran has yet to indicate any shift in its official stance against obtaining such weapons.
Just two months after North Korea announced its exit from the NPT, the U.S. led an invasion of Iraq on the pretext of stopping the country from obtaining weapons of mass destruction. Such a program was never uncovered, however, drawing backlash against then-President George W. Bush‘s administration that permeates today and has been voiced by Trump as well.
A day before Trump would go on to order the strikes against Iran, the U.S. leader responded to a reporter’s comparisons of the two scenarios.
“There were no weapons of mass destruction [in Iraq]. I never thought there were,” Trump said at the time. “And that was somewhat pre-nuclear. It was the nuclear age but nothing like it is today. And it looked like I’m right about the material that they’ve gathered already. It’s a tremendous amount of material and I think within a matter of weeks or certainly within a matter of months they were going to be able to have a nuclear weapon. We can’t let that happen.”
“I was very much opposed to Iraq. I said it loud and clear. But I was a civilian, but I guess I got a lot of publicity. But I was very much opposed to the Iraq War,” he added. “And I actually did say, ‘Don’t go in, don’t go in, don’t go in,’ but I said, ‘If you’re going to go in, keep the oil.’ But they didn’t do that.”
Iravani referenced in his remarks Sunday what he called past U.S. administration’s “illegal invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan” as well as the “catastrophic intervention in Libya,” as evidence that Washington “has ignored the UN Charter, shattered entire societies, and destabilized the region for decades.”
Libyan leader Muammar el-Qaddafi agreed in December 2003, months into the U.S. war in Iraq, to disarm his country’s weapons of mass destruction program in exchange for sanctions relief and better ties with Washington. He was ultimately toppled and killed in 2011 amid a rebellion backed by NATO and then-President Barack Obama.
Obama, who later referred to the U.S. role in Libya as the greatest regret of his presidency, went on to establish a landmark deal with Iran, through which Tehran agreed to strict limits on its nuclear activities in exchange for sanctions relief. The deal won the backing of other major powers, but was ultimately scrapped in 2018 by Trump, prompting Tehran to begin enriching at levels exceeding those necessary for peaceful purposes.
After then-President Joe Biden failed to negotiate with Iran a mutual return to the accord, Trump expressed interest in establishing a new agreement with Tehran upon coming to office a second time in January.
Delegations from both sides engaged in five rounds of talks, with a sixth round scheduled for last Sunday. That meeting was ultimately canceled after Israel began conducting direct attacks across Iran, and Iranian officials have expressed they would no longer be interested in talks following the U.S. intervention on Saturday.
Israeli Permanent Representative to the U.N. Danny Danon accused Iran on Sunday of having “used the negotiating table as camouflage, a delay tactic, a way to buy time while building missiles and enriching uranium.”
The Iranian Armed Forces and Israel Defense Forces (IDF) continued to trade attacks on Sunday.
Trump has yet to outline specific demands for the Islamic Republic, simply warning that further U.S. military action may be on the table “if peace does not come quickly.”
On Sunday, he appeared to open the door for more comprehensive measures against Iran, including overthrowing the government, despite administration officials such as Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth maintaining regime change was not the goal of the White House’s strikes.
“It’s not politically correct to use the term, ‘Regime Change,’” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform, “but if the current Iranian Regime is unable to MAKE IRAN GREAT AGAIN, why wouldn’t there be a Regime change??? MIGA!!!”
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