January 27, 2023
The White House has confirmed that President Joe Biden was not seeking to pursue progress on reviving a 2015 nuclear deal with Iran anytime soon, warning that the United States was preparing to pursue alternative options to ensure the Islamic Republic could not obtain a weapon of mass destruction.
Speaking to reporters on Friday, National Security Council Strategic Communications Coordinator John Kirby asserted that diplomacy toward reviving U.S. participation in the agreement known officially as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) is "not on the agenda" at all.
"There has been no progress on the JCPOA," Kirby said. "And we are not looking to make progress on the JCPOA anytime in the near future."
The remarks were the clearest official indication yet of the administration's shift away from a year-and-a-half-long effort to restore U.S. participation in the agreement, abandoned by then-President Donald Trump in 2018. U.S. officials have acknowledged that the endeavor was no longer the "focus" of their Iran policy since protests erupted in the Islamic Republic last September over the death of a woman in police custody.
Kirby's comments came a month after video emerged of Biden declaring that the deal "is dead, but we're not going to announce it," during an impromptu exchange with Iranian American Democrats of California President Sudi Farokhnia on the sidelines of a November 4 campaign event.
Though diplomacy has been sidelined, Kirby said Friday that Biden "remains absolutely serious about the national security needs that we have for Iran not to be able to achieve a nuclear weapons capability."
Iranian officials have always denied seeking such nuclear capabilities, an argument met with skepticism by the U.S. and a number of its allies and partners. As such, Kirby said that the White House was preparing for other contingencies.
"The president has always said, while he would prefer a diplomatic, peaceful way to achieve an outcome of Iran not having a nuclear weapon, he isn't going to take other options off the table," Kirby added. "We have to make sure that we have the resources, the capabilities, the readiness to achieve that outcome through other means if that is what it comes to."
Tehran, however, has expressed a desire to get talks to resurrect the JCPOA back on track, even as tensions mount between Iran and the West.
"From Iran's perspective, returning parties to the JCPOA and implementing the Deal's commitments would be the only option," the Iranian Permanent Mission to the United Nations told Newsweek.
The JCPOA was established in 2015 by the U.S. and Iran, alongside China, France, Germany, Russia, and the United Kingdom under then-President Barack Obama, whom Biden served as vice president. The deal allowed for the lifting of sanctions against Tehran in exchange for a strict curbing of the country's nuclear activities.
The accord has been criticized by conservatives in Tehran and Washington, and Trump ultimately announced the U.S. exit in 2018, followed by an array of economic restrictions against the Islamic Republic that have curtailed its trade ties.
Throughout its tenure, the Trump administration repeatedly warned that "all options are on the table" in dealing with Iran, and frictions between the two nations neared the point of conflict on at least two occasions, with Iran's shootdown of a U.S. spy drone over the Persian Gulf in 2019 and the U.S. killing of Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) Quds Force chief Major General Qassem Soleimani early the following year.
With the promised benefits of the nuclear deal unfulfilled due to U.S. sanctions, Iran has gradually stepped back from its limitations by enriching uranium at higher levels and downgrading cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
The current administration has criticized its predecessor's decision to withdraw from the JCPOA as a "strategic blunder," and Biden began his effort to revive Washington's participation in the JCPOA shortly after taking office, resulting in nine rounds of talks held in the Austrian capital of Vienna and a "final" draft by the European Union (EU). Discussions began to unravel in August, however, and the process became almost entirely frozen with the onset of nationwide demonstrations in Iran and accusations of human rights abuses.
Kirby said Friday that, in addition to Iran "killing its own citizens" amid the ongoing unrest, Washington's shift was also due to Tehran not "entering the negotiations in a serious way, trying to load it up with a whole bunch of things that had nothing to do with the nuclear deal." The U.S. has also condemned Iran's transfer of loitering munitions, sometimes referred to as "suicide drones," to Russia for use in its ongoing war in Ukraine.
But Iran, which has defended its efforts to crack down on instability as well as its defense cooperation with Russia that predates the Ukraine conflict, has said that it was the U.S. that was trying to insert other agendas into JCPOA negotiations.
"The JCPOA is only about nuclear issues," the Iranian Mission told Newsweek, "and the parties can't inject any other issues to it."
The latest nuclear deal developments came days after Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Nasser Kanaani told a press briefing that, while no official negotiations were taking place, Iranian officials remained in communication with other parties to the agreement.
"The absence of official negotiations and holding official meetings does not mean the absence of interaction or exchange of messages and views," Kanaani said Monday, according to the official Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA).
"In general, the positions and views of the Islamic Republic of Iran are clear in this field," he added, "and if it's in the interests of the Islamic Republic of Iran, it's also in the interests of other parties, including the American government and the European members of the JCPOA, and it seems that all parties are interested in this issue."
Though the EU has continued to play the role of facilitator for stalled JCPOA negotiations, relations with Iran have also deteriorated, with the European Parliament following in the former Trump administration's footsteps to approve a resolution designating the IRGC a terrorist organization last week. EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs Josep Borrell said Monday, however, that such a label could not be made official without a court ruling.
That same day, IRNA cited Borrell as telling reporters in Brussels that the JCPOA was not "dead," but that no progress had been made in reviving it.
Reached for comment by Newsweek, Peter Stano, the European Commission's lead spokesperson foreign affairs, said that "these talks are now stalled, but the High Representative continues to do his utmost to move them forward."
"The current developments in Iran – the ongoing repression against peaceful protesters and military support for the Russian aggression against Ukraine are not helping the overall atmosphere in this regard," Stano said.
"But as the Coordinator, the High Representative is focused on delivering on this role, which means he is coordinating," he added, "and not commenting in public on positions, remarks or actions of either of the parties participating in the talks about bringing the JCPOA back to its full delivery."
And though the U.S. has made known it was exploring other ways to prevent Iran's alleged path to a nuclear weapon, Stano said the JCPOA remained the only means of doing so.
"For the EU, the JCPOA is an important part of the global non-proliferation architecture and there is no viable alternative to this deal," he said. "It provides an international oversight over the Iranian nuclear program and without it, Iran would have been already a nuclear power today."
Iran's IRGC is under the Western spotlight
January 28, 2022
In a reflection of hardening Western attitudes toward the Iranian regime, a number of countries have begun in recent weeks to consider banning the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) in its entirety.
The 125,000-strong IRGC is the Islamic Republic of Iran’s praetorian guard. It is also, alongside the Ministry of Intelligence and Security, the main instrument the regime possesses both for internal repression and for external subversion.
The IRGC is a vital tool of Iranian policy. Responsible for a number of fearful massacres in the first years of the Islamic Republic, it has also carried out assassinations on European soil and elsewhere, from the 1980s until today.
The attempted murder of former Iranian prime minister Shapour Bakhtiar in 1980 in a Paris suburb was among the IRGC’s first high-profile operations on foreign soil. The IRGC finally succeeded in killing Bakhtiar in Suresnes, France, in August 1991.
The assassination of four leading Iranian Kurdish political figures in the Mykonos restaurant in Berlin in September 1992 was among many subsequent high-profile killings in Europe and beyond it.
Former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton (credit: REUTERS/JOSHUA ROBERTS)
The IRGC’s casual dismissal of the legitimacy of state borders and foreign sovereignties has continued until the present time. As recently as August 2022, the US Justice Department announced charges against an IRGC member plotting to kill John Bolton, the former US national security advisor.
Perhaps of greater consequence, the IRGC’s unparalleled skills in proxy and revolutionary warfare are the single most important components in Tehran’s successful advance into the Arab world’s heartland over the last decade. The IRGC’s methods for the recruitment, training, indoctrination and deployment of Shia and other Arab youth, in the service of Tehran, are the key elements that have enabled Iran to outperform its Sunni rivals, and arguably the West also, in this vital realm.
The IRGC's reach and influence throughout the Middle East and beyond
THE PROTOTYPE for the IRGC’s methodology and practice of turning irregular warfare into political power is Lebanese Hezbollah, its earliest franchise. Forty years after its emergence, Hezbollah today controls and rules Lebanon as a satrapy, on Tehran’s behalf.
The IRGC’s creation or sponsorship of parallel and similar bodies has brought it massive and immovable influence in Syria, a dominant role in Iraq, control of a large part of Yemen (including the capital, Sana’a), and a key role in Palestinian politics, where it is today the only state actively providing training and materials to those engaged in armed activity.
The US designated the IRGC as a terrorist organization on April 8, 2019, adding the organization to its Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) list. It was the first Western country to do so. The IRGC, or elements of it, were already on a number of other US designation lists due to its activities in nuclear proliferation, internal human rights abuses, and terrorist and subversive activities.
In recent months, the UK too has made significant progress toward proscribing the IRGC in its entirety. Current UK Security Minister Tom Tugendhat is one of a number of senior British politicians who have long advocated the banning of the IRGC. (Full disclosure: this author submitted evidence to the UK House of Commons Foreign Affairs Select Committee in April 2020 in support of a call to ban the IRGC.)
The issue has reemerged in the UK due to a number of recent incidents. The hanging of former deputy defense minister Alireza Akbari – a dual British citizen charged with spying for MI6 after a confession was extracted through torture – was met with outrage.
In November, Ken McCallum, director general of MI5, Britain’s domestic security service, noted at least 10 recent plots to kidnap or kill British or UK-based individuals by the Iranian regime. This followed warnings by police in preceding months of two active plots by the Iranian regime to kill UK-based journalists.
The House of Commons voted on January 12 in favor of a motion urging the government to ban the IRGC. It remains to be seen if the government will now act on this. “Whitehall sources” quoted by the BBC in a January 3 report said that while no announcement was “imminent,” it was “broadly correct” that the UK government intends to proscribe the IRGC.
In the EU, too, there is growing awareness of the nature of the IRGC and the threat it represents. Similarly, though, while awareness is growing, the final steps toward full proscription still seem some distance away.
On Monday, EU foreign ministers voted to impose new sanctions on 18 Iranian citizens and 19 bodies, including IRGC-related individuals and units, because of the current brutal crackdown on protesters in Iran. But while the European Parliament and some governments have made clear that they favor the EU’s total proscription of the IRGC, EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell this week said that such a proscription can come only if a court in an EU member state finds the IRGC guilty of terrorism.
In Canada, also, there are calls for the proscription of the IRGC in its entirety. On October 7, 2022, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced plans to expand sanctions against the IRGC and to introduce “a new tailored regulation to ensure no sanctioned individual connected to the IRGC can enter Canada.”
On January 9, additional sanctions were announced on two Iranian individuals and three Iranian entities. Canada has designated Iran as a regime that practices terror, but it is currently resisting calls for the complete proscription of the IRGC on the grounds that this would affect individuals conscripted into the organization.
SO WHAT explains the sudden Western interest in the IRGC? Once, European and Western governments tended to see Tehran as mainly a challenge to regional countries. There is now a growing acknowledgment that the long-standing claims by Israeli and Arab voices that the Tehran regime and the IRGC represent a challenge to global order were not simply a rhetorical device intended to drag Western powers into a Middle Eastern contest.
A number of factors are informing this changed perspective. Possibly the most significant is Iranian active support for the Russian war effort in Ukraine. Iranian Shahed-131 and Shahed-136 drones are playing a vital role for Moscow in Ukraine, specifically in attacks on civilians and civilian infrastructure.
The Ukraine war is perceived as the key threat to the US-dominated global order in the West. The growing alliance between Tehran and Moscow, which the war has produced, places Iran squarely on the opposite side from Western European countries, in a conflict that directly and deeply affects them.
Tehran’s crackdown on growing internal dissent, and particularly its repression of women’s rights, is the second key element in hardening Western perceptions of the Iranian regime. The key role being played by the IRGC in the brutal crackdown on the protests further strengthens the case for its proscription.
The failure of efforts to revive the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action agreement is surely an additional element, though lingering hopes in this regard may also explain the reluctance of the UK, EU and Canada to make the final steps.
Finally, it’s ludicrous that Iran is trying to portray itself as an enemy of jihadi extremism, which remains a central security challenge for the West. Case in point are incidents such as the recent attempted murder of author Salman Rushdie by a Lebanese Shia supporter of Hezbollah and Iran. The evidence of ongoing IRGC assassination plans on Western soil confirms this picture.
The time of the West’s indifference to the IRGC is over. United and decisive action against it, however, has not yet begun.
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