Page 10 - MEOG Week 03 2021

MEOG POLICY MEOG

Will Biden bet on a quick

return to the Iran nuclear deal?

IRAN JOE Biden has made it quite plain that as US On the other hand, Tehran says that should
president he wants to take Washington back into Biden do away with the sanctions, it will have no
the 2015 nuclear deal between Iran and major qualms about rectifying the breaches of the deal
powers. that it has made since Trump ended US partici-
The key question at this point might be: Will pation in the JCPOA.
his administration accept that it needs to drop
Donald Trump’s sanctions against Iran before Signature achievement
Tehran returns to full compliance with the The JCPOA is regarded as the signature foreign
accord, or will it insist on that compliance being policy achievement of Trump’s predecessor
restored before it scraps the sanctions? Barack Obama. Moreover, as US vice-presi-
Iran – or at least the hardliners who speak dent, Biden served as Obama’s main promoter
loudest on this issue – has in recent weeks taken of the accord with US lawmakers once the deal
the line that Biden must simply move straight was brokered, lobbying sceptics in Congress
ahead with removing the Trump sanctions with for hours on end, underlining Obama’s pledge
no pre-conditions. that America would always do everything in its
The Iranians claim that they are not interested power to stop Iran from ever developing nuclear
in how quickly the US returns to the nuclear weapons, if diplomacy failed.
deal (formally the Joint Comprehensive Plan Biden no doubt dearly desires to re-estab-
of Action, or JCPOA, and drawn up to keep lish the primacy of the JCPOA as he sets out
Iran’s nuclear development programme purely to cleanse US foreign policy and diplomacy of
civilian in return for a shield against major sanc- Trump’s legacy.
tions) although that is perhaps a little disingen- He has certainly picked a foreign policy team
uous given how such a move would boost their that has no lack of familiarity with the nuclear
Trump-strangled economy; they simply want, deal.
they say, to see Biden incinerate sanctions that Biden’s pick for deputy secretary of state,
should never have been introduced by Trump Wendy Sherman, was Obama’s lead US nego-
in the first place because, as UN inspectors con- tiator for the protracted talks that led to the
firmed at the time Trump unilaterally pulled the agreement. Besides tapping Sherman for his
US out of the multilateral JCPOA in May 2018, administration, Biden has also called back Wil-
Iran never breached the nuclear agreement prior liam Burns, who led secret early JCPOA talks
to the US exit. with Iran in Oman, as his CIA director. And

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