France's new Foreign Minister, Catherine Colonna, said on Tuesday there were only a few weeks to revive Iran's 2015 nuclear deal with world powers, Reuters reported.
Colonna told lawmakers the situation was no longer tenable. She accused Iran of using delaying tactics and, during talks in Doha two weeks ago, of going back on previously agreed positions while forging ahead with its uranium enrichment program.
"There is still a window of opportunity ... for Iran to finally decide to accept an accord which it worked to build, but time is passing," she said, warning that if Iran kept on its current trajectory it would be a threshold nuclear arms state.
"Time is passing. Tehran must realize this," added Colonna, who said that the US mid-term elections would make it even harder to seal a deal.
"The window of opportunity will close in a few weeks. There will not be a better accord to the one which is on the table," she warned.
Iran scaled back its compliance with the 2015 deal, in response to former US President Donald Trump’s withdrawal from the agreement in May of 2018, but has held several rounds of indirect talks with the US on a return to the agreement.
An agreement was nearly reached before the talks stopped in March. US Special Envoy for Iran Rob Malley told lawmakers recently that the prospects for reaching a deal with Iran are “tenuous” at best.
However, when asked on Tuesday if the United States concurred with Colonna's view, a senior US official pointed to Monday's comment by White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan to reporters that "we have not marked a date on the calendar."
Speaking on condition of anonymity, the senior US official acknowledged that the chances of reaching a deal were dwindling and said Washington had not heard anything new from Tehran since the indirect talks in Doha.