Iran Talks ‘Not Our Focus,’ State Department Says

The State Department said today that the Iran talks are not the Biden administration’s focus right now, as Tehran escalates a vicious crackdown on the nationwide protest movement sparked by the murder of a Kurdish-Iranian woman.

State Department spokesman Ned Price made the comments today during the daily press briefing. Although his remarks are hardly a reversal of the administration’s longstanding efforts to get Washington back into the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran, they are noteworthy, suggesting that the protest movement is lowering the likelihood that a deal will ultimately be reached.

“That’s not our focus right now,” said Price. “The Iranians have made very clear that this is a deal that they’re not prepared to make,” adding that a deal is not imminent and that the regime’s demands are not imminent.

“Right now our focus is on the remarkable bravery and courage that the Iranian people are exhibiting through their peaceful demonstrations, through their exercise of their universal right to freedom of assembly and freedom of expression,” he said.

Throughout the Biden administration’s involvement in indirect negotiations with Iran, it has overlooked the theocracy’s malign behavior, including assassination threats targeting U.S. citizens and missile strikes by proxies targeting American bases in the Middle East. The talks continued even after threats against journalist Masih Alinejad and former national-security adviser John Bolton were unveiled.

To be sure, the U.S. has not repudiated the negotiations yet. And Price’s comments don’t mark a repudiation of the diplomatic process, though they are noteworthy for a shift in tone about Washington’s willingness to engage the regime. After it seemed as though an EU-proposed framework had won support from both sides, last-minute Iranian demands in recent months have once again frozen the talks.

Since then, the mass protests in the wake of the brutal killing of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini last month in Tehran, while she was in custody of the Iranian morality police, have grown significantly in recent weeks and spread to various other parts of the country. The Iran Human Rights Organization, which monitors the protest movement, said that 201 people have died during the regime’s crackdown.

Washington has rolled out a series of measures intended to assist the protesters, including sanctions targeting specific Iranian officials and the morality police charged with enforcing the country’s draconian rules on hijab-wearing and religion more broadly. The Treasury Department has also issued actions exempting organizations that attempt to provide Internet access technology to the demonstrators. During previous crackdowns, in 2009, 2017, and 2019, the Iranian government has shut down the Internet.

National-security advisor Jake Sullivan addressed the U.S. response to the protest movement during an event at Georgetown University this afternoon, stressing that the administration is trying to shine a spotlight on Iranian behavior and imposing costs on the regime. “That doesn’t mean that we can stop every bullet and hold back every baton, but we are going to show where we are on this issue and take the practical steps available to us,” he said. Whether or not one of those steps is to officially abandon the ongoing discussions over a return to the nuclear deal, he didn’t say.