The top Iranian officials are demanding that President-elect Joe Biden remove the sanctions and return to the nuclear deal with Iran before any negotiations can proceed.
Biden signaled during his presidential campaign that he intended to return to the 2015 Joint Global Action Plan, which provided relief from Iran’s sanctions and international investment in exchange for containing its nuclear program. President Donald Trump withdrew from the international agreement in 2018 and reimplemented punitive sanctions against the Persian Gulf nation and its leaders.
“What we say is that everything that happened under the Trump administration must go back to the pre-Trump era. We take this seriously,” Mahmoud Vaezi, chief of staff to Iran’s president Hassan Rouhani, told Tasnim news agency on Monday. Vaezi said that all sanctions implemented under the Trump administration should be lifted to improve ties with the U.S.
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Shahriar Heydari, the deputy head of the Iranian parliament’s National Security and Foreign Policy Committee, shared a similar perspective with the Iranian media on Sunday.
“If the cruel sanctions that were imposed on the Iranian nation under Trump are not lifted, the JCPOA will certainly be a loss for Iran,” said Heydari.
“The Islamic Republic of Iran has fulfilled these obligations, but the United States has withdrawn from this international agreement and the Europeans have not fulfilled their obligations under pressure from the White House, [which] it brought JCPOA to the brink of destruction, “said the Iranian official. Heydari warned that American officials should not try to” buy more time “with the negotiations before lifting sanctions.
Newsweek contacted Biden’s transition team for comment, but did not receive an immediate response. In September, Biden wrote an opinion article for CNN calling Trump’s government policy for Iran a “dangerous failure”, adding that he would contact Tehran and offer “a reliable way back to diplomacy”.
Former President Barack Obama joined Iran, the European Union, Germany, France, the United Kingdom, Russia and China in signing the nuclear agreement in 2015. The treaty marked a historic shift in relations between the US and Iran, which has not yet formal diplomatic relations have occurred since 1980.
However, the truce in tensions was short-lived, as Trump withdrew from the international agreement in May 2018, despite consistent reports by the United Nations nuclear body showing that Iran remained in compliance with the agreement. The Trump administration argued that the deal was bad for the U.S. and allowed Iran to finance extremists across the Middle East. But if Trump wanted to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear power, his policy has so far failed. Analysts believe Iran is just a few months away from having adequate nuclear material for weapons, while it would take at least a year when Trump took office.
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European signatories hope that Biden will fulfill his commitment to return to the international agreement. They have been consistent in their criticism of the Trump administration’s policy towards Iran, having worked with China and Russia in their efforts to save the JCPOA.
Germany’s Foreign Minister Heiko Maas said in December that he urged Iran to be cautious in its ongoing nuclear development, pointing out that this could prevent the Biden government from returning to the 2015 agreement.
“To make rapprochement under Biden possible, there should be no more tactical maneuvers of the kind we have seen in abundance recently – they would do nothing but further undermine the agreement,” said Maas.