MUNICH: Germany rejected an appeal by US Vice President Mike Pence on Friday for Europeans to withdraw from the Iranian nuclear deal and isolate Tehran.

Foreign Minister Heiko Maas defended the 2015 agreement under which Iran drastically scaled back its nuclear programme in return for sanctions relief.

“Together with the Brits, French and the entire EU we have found ways to keep Iran in the nuclear agreement until today,” Maas told the Munich Security Conference.

US Vice President Mike Pence accused Iran of anti-Semitism akin to the Nazis following his visit to the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland, saying the trip had strengthened his resolve to act against Tehran.

“We have the regime in Tehran that’s breathing out murderous threats, with the same vile anti-Semitic hatred that animated the Nazis in Europe,” Pence told reporters on Air Force Two before landing in Munich.

He said that being in Auschwitz had made him reflect to “strengthen the resolve of the free world to oppose that kind of vile hatred and to confront authoritarian threats of our time”.

In his statement, the German foreign minister said that “our goal remains an Iran without nuclear weapons, precisely because we see clearly how Iran is destabilising the region”.

Without this agreement, “the region will not be safer and would actually be one step closer to an open confrontation,” he added.

Pence at a conference on the Middle East in Warsaw on Thursday denounced the retention by the Europeans of the nuclear agreement.

He also criticised the initiative of France, Germany and Britain to allow European companies to continue operating in Iran despite US sanctions.

Published in Dawn, February 16th, 2019