Ben Cohen
JNS, Dec. 23, 2022
“… the JCPOA is not on the agenda” and “hasn’t been for some time.” Very, very negative, to be sure, but it still leaves the door to a future agreement ajar.”
Like the parrot in that wonderful Monty Python sketch, American and European diplomats have been trying to persuade themselves that the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran isn’t dead. It’s just resting.
In the period since the 2018 U.S. withdrawal from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA)—the technical name for the deal between Iran, the U.S. and five other world powers—it has become painfully clear that the main foreign policy achievement of former President Barack Obama’s administration is demised, passed on, ceased to be, expired, run down the curtain, no more. In a word, dead. The diplomats know this, but they have been unwilling to make the announcement, preferring instead to claim at frequent intervals that a revived deal at negotiations that have dragged on for more than a year in Vienna is “imminent.”
Will that position change, now that amateur video of U.S. President Joe Biden declaring that the deal is “dead” has surfaced? The answer, maddeningly, seems to be both yes and no.
Biden’s comments on the deal were not intended for public consumption and he uttered them a while ago—on Nov. 4 to be precise, at a campaign stop in Oceanside, California, as voters headed to the midterm elections. In the video, a woman with a Persian accent can be heard asking the president off-camera whether he will declare the JCPOA dead. … [To read the full article, click here]