Speaking to The New Yorker on Saturday, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif compared diplomacy with the United States to the 2004 movie “50 First Dates,” about a man who keeps having first dates with a woman who has short-term memory loss and forgets him the next day.
“We live in a world of possibilities, so nothing is impossible, but we need to see,” he said. “First of all, we’re not angry. Now, if it’s going to lead to resolution, you need to be able to build on what you already have, because, I mean, you remember the movie ‘50 First Dates,’ when you start all over again the following day. We can’t. This is impossible. You need to be able to have a relationship that is based on some foundations. And we have a document”—the nuclear deal—“that is a hundred and fifty pages long. It's not a two-page document.”
“I’m not ruling out the prospect of talks provided the necessary conditions for talks, and that is reliability,” Zarif said. “Reliability is different from trust. Reliability is that when you sign something you are bound by it. Pacta sunt servanda is the old idiom, the basis of international relations.” (It translates, from Latin, as “treaties shall be complied with.”) “Otherwise everything will fall apart,” he said. “We are waiting for some sense of realism.”
The New Yorker also quoted Iranian President Rouhani as saying in response to “internal pressure” that “I have no regrets. I am not sorry. We reached a positive point.” He added that Iran had “proved to the world” that it was “willing to sit around the table,” negotiate, and then comply when it signed an accord.
MS/PR
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