Secretary of State Antony Blinken has declared the Vienna talks on restoring the JCPOA, the 7th round of which ended yesterday, a failure. “The path for diplomacy seems to be failing,” he said during an interview with Reuters. He admitted that President Donald Trump’s 2018 decision to pull out of the 2015 nuclear agreement, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) was “disastrous” because “what’s happened since is that Iran has used that as an excuse, despite the maximum pressure applied against Iran, to also renege on its commitments under the agreement and to inexorably rebuild the nuclear program that the agreement had put in a box.” Not once did Blinken acknowledge Iran’s rights under the JCPOA—to include the right to take measures in response to the failure of other parties to the agreement to live up to their obligations. Nor did he otherwise even mention that the Biden administration has continued the US sanctions imposed by Trump, not because of anything that Iran did, but because Trump considered it “the worst deal ever.” Instead, it’s as if Blinken’s definition of “diplomacy” in this case is that Iran must totally surrender to US demands before the US will give even one inch.
“We had six months of talks before the Iranian elections,” Blinken continued. “We actually made real progress in working through differences and coming close to being able to get to a place where we would have a mutual return with both countries making good on their commitments. Then we had a huge gap after the elections where the new government refused to engage. ... what we’ve seen in the last couple of days is that Iran right now does not seem to be serious about doing what’s necessary to return to compliance, which is why we ended this round of talks in Vienna.”
