U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Sunday called former President Donald Trump’s decision to pull out of the Iran nuclear deal a “terrible mistake,” while at the same time saying Biden administration officials are not currently in talks to revive it.
“We are working across a whole series of lines of effort to push back on them, to make sure we have a strong deterrent, to make sure we have the appropriate pressure, and then to see if we get back to an opportunity where we can work on a nuclear deal,” Blinken said in an interview on CNN’s “Fareed Zakaria GPS.”
“It was a terrible mistake to pull out of that agreement because we had Iran’s nuclear program in a box,” he added. “It’s now … gotten out of that box.”
On the campaign trail in 2020, Joe Biden said he would rejoin the deal if Iran abides by the terms. When pressed on why that has not happened yet given now-President Biden’s pledge, Blinken pushed back, saying “that’s exactly what we sought to do.”
“We worked, engaged intensely – and not just us, our European partners, the U.K., Germany, France, and actually China and Russia as well – to see if we could get back into mutual compliance with the JCPOA, with the nuclear deal,” he said.
“An agreement was on the table,” Blinken added. “Iran either couldn’t or wouldn’t say yes.”
Blinken argued the U.S. offered Iran “modest modifications” to what was essentially the existing deal from 2015, saying the U.S. was not going to “take any deal.”
“It has to meet our security objectives, it has to meet our interests,” he said, adding U.S. officials are making it clear to their counterparts in Iran that they need to take steps to de-escalate tensions in the relationship between the two countries.
The secretary added the Biden administration believes “diplomacy” is the best way to “resolve the problem.”
Republicans have written to the Biden administration expressing concern over its efforts to revive the deal and warning officials not to finalize any agreement without first submitting it to Congress.
“It is imperative that the American people, through Congress, have the opportunity to review any agreement, especially if it would hand tens of billions of dollars to the world’s largest state sponsor of terrorism, and lift sanctions on terrorists with blood on their hands,” then-House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., and Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Texas, wrote in a letter to Blinken in March of last year.
An intelligence assessment from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released earlier this month found Iran is not pursuing nuclear weapons at the moment, but has moved to increase its capacity to produce an atomic bomb since 2020.
The 2015 deal placed restrictions on Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for the U.S. easing sanctions on the country.
