The meeting took place as tensions ran high over the Islamic Republic of Iran’s nuclear program. French President Emmanuel Macron and Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian spoke for 45 minutes on Wednesday, September 24, on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in New York. They posed together in the French delegation’s small office at the organization’s headquarters and left without making any comment after their meeting. Later, the French president stated on X that he once again demanded the release of the three French hostages arbitrarily detained by the Iranian regime: Cécile Kohler, Jacques Paris and Lennart Monterlos.

But most of the discussion focused on the nuclear issue. The timing is critical, three months after Israeli and US strikes on Iran’s military program, which reportedly set the program back by several years, but did not destroy it, contrary to what Donald Trump has claimed. In an effort to pressure Iran into accepting new negotiations to regulate its nuclear activities, European countries turned to one of their few remaining levers: reactivating the international sanctions that had been lifted when the first compromise, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPoA), was signed in 2015. (The US president withdrew from JCPoA three years later.) Since then, Tehran has abandoned the commitments it made a decade ago, which European nations now seek to penalize.

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