The White House has reiterated it sees no prospect of the Iran nuclear agreement being revived in the near future, after footage of President Joe Biden describing the deal as "dead" appeared on social media.
Biden's comments were captured in an unverified video published earlier on 20 December, with the original publisher saying it was filmed on the sidelines of an election campaign event in California on 4 November. In the clip, Biden is asked by a woman, likely a member of the Iranian diaspora, to "please announce that the [Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action] JCPOA is dead". The JCPOA refers to the nuclear agreement signed between Iran and world powers in 2015 — a deal Washington pulled out of under former president Donald Trump in 2018.
Many Iranians in the diaspora have been urging the US and the west at large to stop engaging with the Iranian leadership, particularly on the JCPOA, following Tehran's increasingly harsh crackdown on protests that were sparked by the death of a young woman in police custody in September. Biden initially responds to the question with a "no", and when asked why not, he says "a lot of reasons". But the president then follows it up by saying the deal "is dead, but we are not going to announce it".
The White House said Biden's comments align with the US government's stance. "Nobody's questioning the authenticity of [the video]," White House foreign policy communications co-ordinator John Kirby said. "The President's comments are very much in line with everything we've been saying about the JCPOA, which is just not our focus right now."
Washington does not anticipate any progress on reviving the nuclear deal in the near future, Kirby said. "We simply don't see a deal coming together anytime soon while Iran continues to kill its own citizens and is selling UAVs to Russia. So what we're focused on right now are practical ways to confront Iran in those areas and not on the Iran deal."
The video of Biden surfaced just as Iran's foreign minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian was meeting with the EU high representative for foreign affairs Josep Borrell on the sidelines of a conference in the Jordanian capital, Amman. The talks covered a range of issues, not least the state of the nuclear negotiations which, despite making good progress earlier this year, stalled in late summer over several points of contention between Tehran and Washington.
Kamal Kharrazi, a senior adviser to Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said on 19 December that all but one area of disagreement had been resolved — namely a long-standing impasse over an investigation by the International Atomic Energy Agency into undeclared traces of uranium in Iran.
Borrell described today's meeting as "necessary… amidst deteriorating Iran-EU relations". The EU has in recent weeks imposed new sanctions on Iranian individuals and entities for their involvement in the production and supply of drones for Russia to use against Ukraine, and for what it describes as the "violent repression" of the recent protests in Iran.
On the issue of the JCPOA, Borrell said Iran and the EU "must keep communications open" and restore the agreement based on the talks that have taken place between Iran, the US and the other JCPOA partners since April 2021. For its part, Iran's foreign ministry flagged the JCPOA talks as a "key issue" under discussion today, and "advised the other sides to avoid politicizing the issue, to adopt a realistic and constructive approach and make the necessary decisions to announce a deal".
