Foreign secretary will spend two days in Washington in talks with Mike Pence and John Bolton

This article is more than 2 years old

This article is more than 2 years old



Boris Johnson is travelling to the US as part of a diplomatic effort to persuade Donald Trump not to scrap the Iran nuclear deal.

The president has fiercely criticised the agreement, which eased sanctions on Tehran in exchange for commitments to abandon its nuclear weapons programme. Trump will decide on 12 May whether to reimpose sanctions and effectively torpedo the international alliance behind the deal.

Q&A Why is Trump hostile to Iran? Show Hide The genesis of Trump’s particular antipathy to Iran is hard to pin down. Before entering office he had been sceptical of Iran’s regional rival, Saudi Arabia. But during the 2016 election campaign all his closest foreign policy advisors, such as Michael Flynn, shared a worldview that portrays Iran as an uniquely malign actor in the Middle East and beyond. After the election, Israel, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates were successful in capturing the ear of Trump and his son-in-law and top adviser Jared Kushner.

The foreign secretary will travel to Washington on Sunday for two days of talks with senior administration officials including vice-president Mike Pence.

He will also meet national security adviser John Bolton and key foreign policy leaders in Congress.

As well as Iran, Johnson’s talks are expected to cover North Korea, before Trump’s planned meeting with Kim Jong-un, and the situation in Syria.

Trump has threatened to withdraw from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action deal with Iran signed by the US, China, Russia, Germany, France and Britain.

Under its terms Iran is committed to a peaceful nuclear energy programme.

Trump has been a vocal critic of the agreement and in January issued an ultimatum to “either fix the deal’s disastrous flaws, or the United States will withdraw”.

Earlier this month Johnson stressed the importance of keeping the deal “while building on it in order to take account of the legitimate concerns of the US”.

The European Union said the deal “is working and it needs to be preserved”.

Before his trip to Washington, Johnson said: “On so many of the world’s foreign policy challenges the UK and US are in lockstep. We’ve seen this recently with the response to the poisonings in Salisbury, our strong response to Assad’s use of chemical weapons in Syria, and the effort to denuclearise North Korea.

“The UK, US and European partners are also united in our effort to tackle the kind of Iranian behaviour that makes the Middle East region less secure – its cyber activities, its support for groups like Hezbollah, and its dangerous missile programme, which is arming Houthi militias in Yemen.”