US Secretary of State Antony Blinken doubted down Tuesday on the assertion that the United States no longer considers reaching an agreement with Iran over its nuclear program a priority, and warned Tehran of “consequences” for its actions at home and in Russia.
At a press conference in Washington alongside UK Foreign Secretary James Cleverly, Blinken said Iran had long rejected the possibility of reviving the original agreement from 2015, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action.
“The Iranians killed the opportunity to come back to that agreement swiftly many months ago,” he said. “There was an opportunity on the table that they rejected, an opportunity that was approved by all who were involved.”
In 2018, then-US president Donald Trump withdrew from the deal, which traded sanctions relief for curbs on Iran’s nuclear program. He then instituted a “maximum pressure” sanctions regime targeting various Iranian sectors, leading Tehran to respond by expanding its nuclear program in violation of the JCPOA.
While US President Joe Biden vowed to try and revive the deal when entering office, his administration has indicated in recent months that it has abandoned the possibility given Tehran’s radicalized positions on the matter demanding at one point that the US remove the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps from its list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations; Iran’s cooperation with Russia in the latter’s invasion of Ukraine; and the anti-regime protests that have swept Iran since mid-September, which Tehran has accused Western powers of orchestrating. In a video that surfaced last month, Biden said that the prospect of reviving the deal with Iran was “dead,” but that he would not announce this publicly.