FOREIGN POLICY
by Joseph Bahout, Benjamin Haddad
March 30, 2015

The French don’t trust Iran’s nuclear promises, but they don’t trust Washington much, either.

As a March 31 deadline looms in the negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program, the United States and France, two strong allies, have found themselves increasingly at odds, at times quite publicly. While the White House has been pushing hard for consensus on the framework for a deal ahead of the deadline, Paris has been pushing back. “Repeating that an agreement has to be reached by the end of March is a bad tactic. Pressure on ourselves to conclude at any price,” Gérard Araud, France’s ambassador in Washington, tweeted on March 20. On Tuesday, François Delattre, France’s ambassador to the United Nations, said that Iran’s progress was “insufficient.” … “France wants an agreement, but a robust one that really guarantees that Iran can have access to civilian nuclear power, but not the atomic bomb,” French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius declared on March 21. READ MORE