According to a report from The Associated Press, the Biden administration is considering a “near wholesale rollback” of some of the stringent Trump-era sanctions on Iran as the two sides are negotiating a revival of the nuclear deal, known as the JCPOA.
Iran is willing to return to the nuclear limits set by the JCPOA if the US lifts all sanctions that have been imposed since 2018 when the US withdrew from the agreement. But because the Biden administration refuses to do so, the US and Iran are negotiating what sanctions will be lifted.
Unnamed US officials who spoke with AP did not specify which sanctions the Biden administration is now considering lifting but said the US is becoming “increasingly expansive about what they might be prepared to offer Iran.”
In public comments, Biden officials have been vague about what sanctions the US is willing to lift. State Department spokesman Ned Price has said the US would lift measures that are “inconsistent” with the JCPOA, but it’s not clear what that means.
The Trump administration slapped an enormous number of sanctions on Iran. Some were related to the Islamic Republic’s civilian nuclear program, while others were imposed over claims of terrorism or alleged human rights abuses. For example, the sanctions implemented on Iran’s central bank and state shipping companies are considered terror-related.
One thing Biden officials have been clear about is that they are not willing to lift all non-nuclear-related sanctions, which greatly complicates negotiations. An unnamed State Department official told AP that the US now has “to go through every sanction to look at whether they were legitimately or not legitimately imposed.”
In the final months of Trump’s presidency, his administration ramped up sanctions on Iran, purposely imposing more non-nuclear-related ones to sabotage Biden’s plans to return to the JCPOA. The strategy seems to be at least slowing down a revival of the agreement and sets up Biden for criticism from Iran hawks if he lifts a lot of other sanctions.
We have no reason to think that Iran is “negotiating” anything less than a rollback of everything Trump did after he violated the agreement, all done in bad faith for fake reasons exactly to prevent return to it.
I find it amusing how often they report that “the Biden administration is considering” doing something good. We aught to track how often they actually do something good. Are the Democrats more capable of producing fluff than Republicans? Anyone keeping score?
I wonder if that is the use of “trial balloons” that was a regular feature of the Obama admin.
I think you nailed it, Mark! They have been putting out a lot of those lately and they appear to be repackaged “trial balloons.” Also, remember Obama’s obsession with “the narrative?”
At least he’s got that policy going in the right direction – can’t think of any other one so far.
The core demand was never nukes, but the RGC (in US official-ese, a “Terrorist Group”).
Short of regime change they’re asking them to disband the Revolutionary Guard, …ie., to abandon support for coreligionists in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Yemen. They will be allowed a limited armed force, …mainly for internal security, like Al Sisi.
POINTING in the right direction.. We will see if he takes it there or not.
Rebuilding the infrastructure would be a good thing if he were to pay it by cutting our “defense” budget by $500 billion per year putting us on par with China. Plus all the wasted money on “security” like having 17 god damn intelligence agencies or spending trillions on revamping our nukes or NSA or….
https://journal-neo.org/2021/04/30/iranian-alternative-to-the-suez-canal/
Iranian Alternative to the Suez Canal. Authored by Valery Kulikov.
Washington has a problem with it, which is why it make sense.
Waste of Time…!
All of this is nonsense. The “real deal” was Iran signing the NPT in 1968, ratifying the same in 1970.
Indeed and JCPOA is NPT on steroids.
The artificial problems around JCPOA have arisen from our arbitrary injecting of conventional weaponry into what should be a purely nuclear agreement.
It is really astonishingly simple. If you do not have a nuclear arsenal you cannot have nuclear-tipped missiles.
When we lift certain sanctions that aren’t related to terrorism or human rights abuses, what stops us from shifting sanctions related to the civilian nuclear program into the sanctions related to terrorism and human rights abuses? So there could end up being the same amount of sanctions by simply putting them in a different category. And since Blinken has called Iran a “state sponsor of terrorism” and one of our brain dead generals has stated that we must confront China, Russia AND Iran why in the world would anyone think that we would be anymore trustworthy than we were during Trump’s years?
“[T]o go through every sanction to look at whether they were legitimately or not legitimately imposed.”
Coming from a position of extrajudicial arrogance, I can understand their perplexity.
Has anyone here noticed too that President Biden did not say “Iran” even once during his speech last Wednesday?