‘No contact’ made between Biden and Tehran officials: Iran foreign ministry

ERBIL, Kurdistan Region —  A spokesperson for Iran’s foreign ministry has said there has been no contact between Tehran and US President-elect Joe Biden despite hopes his administration will cool tensions between Washington and the Islamic Republic.  

“We will not be in contact with anyone except in relation to the JCPOA,” Saeed Khatibzadeh said during a Monday press conference, referring to the 2015 nuclear deal. 

“Once the new administration is in power, we will decide. We need to see the trajectory of the US actions. These actions are important, not the words, analysis and speculation,” he was quoted by Iranian state media as saying.

President Hassan Rouhani on Sunday called on the US to “compensate for past mistakes” and return to the 2015 nuclear deal.

Rouhani had said that it did not matter who won the presidential election, as the next administration would “surrender” to Iran.

"The US can neither impose negotiations, nor war! Life is hard under sanctions, but it is harder without independence,” he tweeted on September 22.

The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), also signed by the UK, France, China, Germany and Russia was designed to curb Iranian nuclear ambitions in return for a lift on sanctions. Current President Donald Trump unilaterally withdrew from the agreement in 2018, reimposing harsh sanctions on the Islamic Republic.

In a Foreign Policy article earlier this year, Biden said he would return the US to the nuclear deal if elected as president – consistent with comments made throughout his campaign for the White House.

“On nonproliferation and nuclear security, the United States cannot be a credible voice while it is abandoning the deals it negotiated,” he wrote, saying current US President Donald Trump “rashly” cast the deal aside and “bankrupted” US credibility on the global stage. 

“Tehran must return to strict compliance with the deal. If it does so, I would rejoin the agreement and use our renewed commitment to diplomacy to work with our allies to strengthen and extend it, while more effectively pushing back against Iran’s other destabilizing activities,” he said. 

Since 2018, Washington has continued to announce economic measures against Iran and Iranian-linked entities as part of a “maximum pressure campaign” on Tehran, and recently announced sanctions against Iran’s oil and petroleum industries. 

Tehran has serially violated the JCPOA, and said it would no longer abide to restrictions on uranium enrichment activities after the US assassination of Iranian general Qasem Soleimani in January. 

Oil Minister Bijan Zanganeh said on Monday that the new US sanctions showed the "vengefulness" of Trump, but do not faze Tehran. 

US outlet Axios has reported that Washington is planning to impose a “flood” of sanctions on Iran before Trump leaves office, quoting Israeli officials.

Elliot Abrams, the US Special Representative to Iran, was in Israel on Sunday and allegedly discussed the sanctions with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

“There are no more sanctions to be imposed, these sanctions have no teeth. We are not scared of the sanctions and they have not interfered with our operation, what they have done is to make us more firm," said Zanganeh.