Iranian Foreign Minister: Biden Secretly ‘in a Hurry’ to Revive Nuclear Deal

Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian insisted on Saturday that despite public proclamations the Iran nuclear deal is dead, the Biden administration is secretly “in a hurry to reach the agreement,” and the Iranians are getting a bit annoyed with the Biden team’s constant behind-the-scenes pleading.

“Three days ago, we received a message from the United States, and told them that the [International Atomic Energy Agency’s] accusations against Iran’s nuclear program should be resolved,” Abdollahian said while visiting Armenia on Saturday.

“Americans are contradictory in their words and behavior, as they are in a hurry to reach the agreement in their message,” he complained.

Abdollahian claimed the Biden administration is “seeking to exert political and psychological pressure” to gain “concessions in the negotiations,” but the Iranians are unmoved by their tactics.

“We do not give any concessions to the American side, and we move within the framework of logic and the framework of an agreement that respects the red lines of the Islamic Republic of Iran, but at the same time we never leave the negotiating table,” he said.

Abdollahian’s account is quite a bit different from the public pronouncements of the Biden administration, which worked long and hard to revive President Barack Obama’s 2015 nuclear deal after President Donald Trump withdrew in 2018, but has lately expressed frustration with Iranian intransigence and pronounced the deal all but dead.

The Biden team began grumbling in July, after eight unsuccessful rounds of negotiations, that Iran was not serious about putting the deal back together — particularly under hardline President Ebrahim Raisi, who took power in June 2021. 

Biden was eager to restore what Obama touted as a major foreign policy achievement, but the Iranians made unilateral demands that not even the Biden administration could swallow. Among them were complete sanctions relief before negotiations could begin in earnest, a lifting of the well-earned terrorist designation Trump applied to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), and some kind of unbreakable promise that no future U.S. administration could ever level sanctions against Iran again.

In September, senior administration officials told the House Foreign Affairs Committee the deal was effectively dead after Iran seemingly reached an agreement in principle, only to back out without warning two weeks later.

Iranian officials, including Abdollahian, blamed the Biden team for coming up short on vital concessions demanded by Tehran. 

“The issue of guarantees is very important to us. The American side has taken some steps towards giving us guarantees. We just need these guarantees to become a little bit more complete,” the Iranian foreign minister said in late September.

Besides making demands not even Joe Biden was willing to grant, the Iranians engaged in various misbehavior that made it politically difficult for the U.S. to re-enter the deal, such as plotting to murder former U.S. officials. The protests currently sweeping Iran over its “morality police” killing a young woman for failing to wear her mandatory headscarf snugly enough make it all but unthinkable for Biden to announce fresh concessions to the brutal regime in Tehran, and if that was not enough to push this White House away from the negotiating table, Iran supplying Russia with drones to attack Ukraine surely would.

Ned Price, spokesman for a clearly peeved State Department, told reporters two weeks ago that restoring the nuclear deal is “not our focus right now.”

“It is very clear and the Iranians have made very clear that this is not a deal that they have been prepared to make. The deal certainly does not appear imminent. Nothing we’ve heard in recent weeks suggests they have changed their position,” Price fumed.

Price said the U.S. government would instead focus on “the remarkable bravery and courage that the Iranian people are exhibiting through their peaceful demonstrations” and “supporting them in the ways we can.” 

Secretary of State Antony Blinken likewise stated last week that revival of the nuclear deal is unlikely while the Iranian regime is murdering protesters, including children, and selling suicide drones to Russia. 

“There’s no imminent agreement, and there’s no imminent agreement because the Iranians continue to inject extraneous issues into the discussions about the JCPOA.  And as long as they continue to do that, there is no possibility, no prospect for an agreement,” Blinken said.