“Rouhani is playing hardball,” said Sanam Vakil, an Iran scholar at Chatham House, a think tank in London, and at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University. Mr. Rouhani, a moderate, has staked his reputation on sealing the nuclear deal and relieving the Iranian economy of debilitating international sanctions. In a rejoinder to Mr. Trump’s call to renegotiate the nuclear deal, he said that “all countries” at the General Assembly meeting supported the nuclear deal, “except the United States and the Zionist regime,” a reference to Israel. Mr. Trump’s secretary of state, Rex W. Tillerson, has said that the Iran nuclear agreement must be changed or the United States would not stick with it. The possibility that Washington might renege on the deal has worried some countries, especially as the world grapples with North Korea’s nuclear and ballistic missile development.

Source: New York Times September 22, 2017 11:50 UTC