President Biden’s administration has opened the door to a direct meeting with Iranian officials in a bid to halt the intensifying standoff over the regime’s nuclear program and eventually restore the 2015 nuclear deal scrapped by former President Donald Trump’s team.
“The United States would accept an invitation from the European Union High Representative to attend a meeting of the P5+1 and Iran to discuss a diplomatic way forward on Iran’s nuclear program,” State Department spokesman Ned Price said in a Thursday announcement.
That statement raises the likelihood of a meeting between the U.S. and the other signatories to the 2015 deal, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. Trump exited the pact and renewed U.S. economic sanctions that Iran hawks on his team hoped would force Tehran to accept tighter constraints on the regime’s nuclear program and roll back its other aggressive operations in the Middle East, but Biden and European allies regard the nuclear agreement as a mechanism to defuse a near-term nuclear crisis in the Middle East.
“The goal of coming together would be to sit down and to start what could be a prolonged path of trying to get back to a situation where both the U.S. and Iran were back into compliance,” a senior State Department official told reporters Thursday evening. “But that’s not going to happen without a meeting, and therefore, we’d be prepared to sit down and talk about what are the steps that need to be taken to get back to that point, and then, as I said, build on that to broaden and strengthen the deal.”
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In addition to announcing their interest in a meeting of the nuclear pact signatories, U.S. officials in New York said they “submitted a letter today” that disavows then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s attempt to “snapback” the international sanctions waived by the United Nations Security Council when the nuclear deal was first implemented in 2015 — a maneuver that most Security Council members, including key allies in Europe, repudiated on the grounds that the U.S. had relinquished that authority when Trump left the Iran deal.
“Separately, the U.S. Mission to the United Nations up in New York has notified the Iranian mission that the United States is bringing the domestic travel controls on Iranian representatives back in line with those in place for several other missions to the UN,” a second senior State Department official said. “So essentially, returning to the status quo of the last few years before the last administration.”
The overture comes just days before a deadline set by the Iranians, who have threatened to curtail nuclear inspections beginning Sunday. An Iranian law, passed in January, calls for limiting the U.N. nuclear watchdog to inspect only declared nuclear sites and deny snap inspections entirely.
“Until we sit down and talk, nothing’s going to happen,” the first State Department official said. “It doesn’t mean that when we sit down and talk, we’re going to succeed, but we do know that if we don’t take that step, the situation’s just going to go from bad to worse.”
That posture yields to Tehran the strategic initiative in the nuclear talks, according to Iran hawks who assessed that the Iranians, after digging in their heels during the Trump administration, would buckle if Biden signaled that he would retain the maximum pressure campaign.
“The administration’s actions today make clear that President Biden wants to return to the JCPOA and give Iran billions in sanctions relief — even as Iran is committing nuclear blackmail and using its proxies to attack Americans,” Rep. Liz Cheney, a Wyoming Republican and senior member of the House GOP leadership team, said in response to the move. “Re-engaging with the human rights abusers in Tehran to revive this disastrous, outdated agreement will embolden a ballistic missile-armed, terrorist regime and make us and our allies more vulnerable to their hostile behavior.”
France, Germany, and the United Kingdom — the E3, as they are known in diplomatic circles — issued a joint statement with the U.S. that hailed the prospect of both countries returning to compliance with the deal while rebuking Tehran for other nuclear threats.
“The E3 and the United States also expressed their shared concerns over Iran’s recent actions to produce both uranium enriched up to 20 percent and uranium metal,” the joint statement said. “These activities have no credible civil justification. Uranium metal production is a key step in the development of a nuclear weapon.”
Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s team defended the decision, pointing to those Iranian moves as a cost of the Trump administration’s policy while pledging its opposition to a sanctions relief “down payment” prior to the expected meeting.
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“Iran has made a number of requests about the U.S. and its sanctions,” the first State Department official said. “The Iranians have the expectation and the desire that the U.S. would take these steps in anticipation of any meeting, sort of as a prerequisite to or as a down payment … We’re prepared to talk about all these things, but let’s talk about them to work through them together, to see what we would need to do, and what they would need to do in order to get back to the point where we’re both in compliance.”
