The Last Word in the First Step

The new U.S. administration has already begun the same old song and dance about launching a complex would-be psychological war against Iran over the nuclear deal. With its targeted selection of foreign policy officials and conflicting accounts of Joe Biden’s position on Iran, the White House is trying to leverage the unsuccessful “maximum pressure” campaign of sanctions implemented under the Donald Trump administration into concessions from Iran on the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. These statements by Biden administration officials are carefully planned and offer a glimpse into the complicated calculations the new White House team is making in the early weeks of this presidency.

At his Senate confirmation hearing, Biden’s Secretary of State nominee Antony Blinken reiterated the same well-worn claims that his predecessors did in order to make a boogeyman out of Iran, claiming, “The breakout time, the time it would take Iran to produce enough fissile material for one weapon, has gone from beyond a year, as it was under the JCPOA, to about three or four months.” Blinken later told NBC that if Iran continues to violate the nuclear agreement, it is only a few weeks away from acquiring the materials needed to build a nuclear weapon. He also stated that if Iran returns to compliance with its obligations under the nuclear agreement, the new U.S. administration is ready to return to the deal and that Washington is trying, with the help of its allies, to reach a more comprehensive agreement with Tehran.

At the United States Institute of Peace on Jan. 29, Biden’s national security advisor, Jake Sullivan, said, “a critical early priority has to be to deal with what is an escalating nuclear crisis … they (Iran) are significantly closer to a nuclear weapon than they were when the previous administration withdrew from the JCPOA.”

During a press conference on the same day, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki replied to a question about whether President Biden would consider meeting with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani by saying that “the first step here is … for Iran to comply with the significant nuclear constraints under the deal.” The press secretary also said that, “He (President Biden) believes that through follow-on diplomacy, the U.S. should seek to lengthen and strengthen these nuclear constraints and address other issues of concern, including Iran’s ballistic missiles program and its regional activity.”

Biden’s defense secretary, Gen. Lloyd Austin, said in his Senate confirmation hearing that Biden wants to resume talks with Iran. In the same hearing, he claimed that Iran is a destabilizing force in the region that puts America’s allies in danger, and insisted that Iran’s access to a nuclear weapon makes achieving stability in the region even more difficult. He later spoke about the normalization of relations between the Arab nations of the Persian Gulf and the Zionist regime, claiming that any normalization of relations was a positive step which would put pressure on Iran.

These statements show that Biden’s team is intentionally contradicting itself on the details of America’s return to the JCPOA in order to delay such a return and force concessions out of Iran.

Then there are the European nations who failed to fulfill their obligations under the JCPOA during the Trump administration and eventually fell in line with Trump’s efforts to break the Iranian people’s resolve. Some of them are now going even further than Biden’s team. For example, French President Emmanuel Macron, who is facing a number of serious issues domestically, has claimed that future P5+1 negotiations with Iran should include the child-murdering leaders of Saudi Arabia, whose hands are already soaked in the blood of hundreds of thousands of oppressed Yemenis.

These statements show that the European leaders and Biden’s team have not learned the lesson of Trump’s defeat. They think that by professing their willingness to return to the JCPOA, while maintaining sanctions in the interim and tying domestic Iranian issues to future negotiations, they will somehow be able not only to revive the international consensus against Iran, but also force the Iranian people to accept the same demands that Trump pursued with military threats and vows to destroy the Iranian economy. But Trump failed in this pursuit, and he and his extremist team were consigned to the dustbin of history.

We should heed the wise words of the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Revolution in a meeting with commanders of the air force on Feb. 7, in particular his reference to statements about sanctions by U.S. and European officials. “First of all, no one in the Islamic Republic believes what those incompetent prattlers say — whether they are in European countries or in the U.S. Secondly, if we look at this logically, the U.S. and the three European countries do not have the right to set terms and conditions because they have violated all of their JCPOA commitments. They have not honored any of their commitments. Only for a short period did they temporarily lift some, but not all, of the sanctions. But then they restored those sanctions and added even more. Therefore, they do not have the right to set conditions. It is the Islamic Republic of Iran that has the right to set terms and conditions for the continuation of the JCPOA, because from the outset Iran followed all of its obligations under the agreement while they violated theirs,” he said. He went on to express Iran’s firm position on returning to the nuclear deal, stating, “If they want Iran to return to its commitments under the agreement, the U.S. has to lift all sanctions in practice, not just on paper. Then we will check and verify that they have been truly removed, and if they have been lifted, we will return to our JCPOA commitments.”

But despite the Americans’ attempts to play games with Iran, Iran today has changed noticeably compared to either the period during the Barack Obama administration when the nuclear agreement was reached, or under the Trump administration, with its violation of the agreement and Trump’s maximum pressure campaign against the Iranian people. Namely, the animosity of the United States toward the Iranian people is now widely known, and Iran will no longer fall prey to its deception. Now the path Iran must take is clear, and by continuing to implement “active resistance” against the sanctions regime, Iran will be able to vaccinate itself against this new wave of psychological warfare.

In that same meeting with air force commanders on Feb. 7, the Supreme Leader outlined a plan to challenge the White House’s greedy pursuit of further restrictions, saying, “We cannot completely attribute Iran’s victory over the sanctions regime to the enemy’s incompetence. There were other factors at play, such as the hard work and dedication of the Iranian people, their faith in the necessity of resisting sanctions, and their trust in the divine promise.” The Supreme Leader emphasized that “Nothing can be accomplished by sitting around and watching. By being active and present leaders and by trusting in God, our commanders can continue to develop and increase Iranian power.”