China to Host Russia and Iran for Nuclear Talks on Friday

March 13, 2025 TruthUSA

China will hold talks with officials from Russia and Iran to discuss Iran’s nuclear program as Washington resurrects a maximum pressure campaign on Tehran.

China’s communist leadership will host officials from Russia and Iran this week to discuss issues related to nuclear weapons development.

The March 14 meeting in Beijing will focus in particular on the issue of Iran’s nuclear development, according to China’s foreign ministry.

China’s Vice Foreign Minister Ma Zhaoxu will chair the meeting and discuss the issue with deputy foreign ministers from Moscow and Tehran, a foreign ministry spokesperson said during a press conference on Wednesday.

The meeting coincides with a closed-door gathering of the United Nations Security Council in New York the same day regarding Iran’s expanding stores of uranium that are close to weapons-grade.

The meeting also closely follows an announcement by U.S. President Donald Trump last week that the United States would seek to negotiate a new nuclear deal with Iran to replace the one it withdrew from during Trump’s first term in office.

Trump reaffirmed the United States’ position that Iran should never be allowed to acquire nuclear weapons and said he was open to a new nuclear deal or else might resort to military action.

“There’ll be some interesting days ahead. That’s all I can tell you. You know, we’re down to final strokes with Iran … [we] can’t let them have a nuclear weapon,” Trump said at the time.

“I’ve written them a letter saying, ‘I hope you’re going to negotiate because if we have to go in militarily, it’s going to be a terrible thing,’” he added.

Tehran does not have any weapons of mass destruction at present. Still, it has continued to enrich uranium at near weapons-grade levels since Trump terminated a bilateral nuclear agreement in 2018 that had placed limits on such activities.

The report by the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency last month said that Iran has roughly 605 pounds of uranium enriched up to a 60 percent threshold.

That purity is a short technical step away from being converted to the 90 percent required for a nuclear weapon and presents about a 40 percent increase in the quantity of Iran’s enriched uranium since last August.

According to the report, such an amount would allow Tehran to produce about half a dozen nuclear weapons if it so chose.

For its part, Moscow has suggested that it would be willing to work as an intermediary between Washington and Tehran as the Trump administration moves to normalize relations with Russia.

Ties between Iran and Russia have deepened since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, with the two powers signing a strategic cooperation treaty exchanging arms and military expertise.

Both powers also have close diplomatic and economic partnerships with communist China.

Beijing is in the midst of its own nuclear breakout and has moved swiftly in recent years to rapidly expand and modernize its nuclear arsenal against the complaints of the United States and its allies.

The Pentagon has assessed that China will have more than 1,000 nuclear warheads by 2030 and that it currently maintains more land-based launchers for long-range missiles than the United States.

Chinese Communist Party leader Xi Jinping previously said that he supports Iran’s efforts to safeguard itself, and China has become a central piece in Iran’s efforts to skirt international sanctions on its oil sales.

China began to import a record amount of Iranian oil after the imposition of international sanctions in 2022. The following year, Chinese state-owned entities made barter deals with Iran, circumventing the need for sanctionable currency transactions altogether, including a $2.64 billion investment in Iran’s largest airport.

Source link