Blinken Refuses to Rule Out Iran Nuclear Deal amid Tehran’s Brutal Crackdowns

The nationwide protest movement against the Iranian dictatorship continues. Large groups of people are taking to the streets, in a show of outrage about the murder of Mahsa Amini, and Iranian security forces have, in more than one case, resorted to indiscriminate violence. The New York Times recently ran a revealing investigation into one particularly horrifying massacre at a prayer complex in an ethnically Baluch part of the country.

Although Washington is willing to take certain steps to support the demonstrators — such as making a few targeted sanctions designations and making it easier for people to provide them with communications technology — officials remain unwilling to abandon the ongoing nuclear talks with Iran. A potential agreement would effectively result in massive transfers of funds, potentially in the hundreds of billions of dollars, to Iran’s rulers. In short, officials are taking the side of the protesters rhetorically, but without following all the way through on implementing a maximalist support program.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken, speaking today in Washington during a joint press conference with his French counterpart, Catherine Colonna, said Iran’s unreasonable demands remain the primary obstacle to a prospective deal. He did not, however, rule out such a deal on human-rights grounds, as many advocates of the protest movement have advocated. He described U.S. measures intended to back the protest movement — sanctions on the morality police, sanctions waivers for technological support — then addressed the negotiations on the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA)

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.  We continue to believe that a diplomatic resolution to the challenge posed by Iran’s nuclear program remains the best way forward, and we continue to be determined that Iran never acquire a nuclear weapon or the capacity to build one, including the fissile material necessary to fuel one.

Taken with other signals in recent weeks, Blinken’s latest comments strongly suggest that the administration as a whole has decided to silo off the future of the talks from other developments — namely Tehran’s brutal handling of the protests and also its transfer of drones to the Russian military.

For the past couple of weeks, various Biden administration representatives, such as State Department spokesman Ned Price and National Security Council communications coordinator John Kirby, have similarly declined to rule out a return to the deal, while saying something along the lines of it’s not a focus right now.

President Biden’s official national-security strategy, released last week, uses a similar formulation referring generally to diplomacy with Iran without mentioning a return to the JCPOA in particular. Whether there’s any significance to that is unclear. The president, for his part, has spoken out rather clearly on this, saying last week that “it stunned me what it awakened in Iran” and that the U.S. stands with “the brave women of Iran.”

But talk is cheap, and the administration has also made at least one unforced error here besides holding the JCPOA return as an option: The invitation of an Iranian-American advocate who admires former foreign minister and sophisticated regime propagandist Javad Zarif to a recent meeting with Blinken and other officials.

The few initial steps Washington took to express solidarity with Iranian demonstrators amounted to a fine show of goodwill. But the administration’s failure to go further suggests that it’s hedging its bets and holds out hope that it can one day make a deal with the leaders behind the ongoing violence targeting ordinary people.