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Antony Blinken speaks during his confirmation hearing to be Secretary of State before the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee in Washington, DC on January 19, 2021. Photo: Graeme Jennings/AFP
ERBIL, Kurdistan Region — US president-elect Joe Biden’s Secretary of State nominee Antony Blinken has warned that the Iran’s nuclear issue may soon reach “crisis point,” with Tehran a few months away from being able to produce a nuclear weapon.
In comments made to the Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee on Tuesday, Blinken said Iran’s consistent breaches of 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Actions (JCPOA) have reached a critical level.
“The time it would take Iran to produce enough fossil material for one weapon has gone from beyond a year as it was under the JCPOA to about 3 or 4 months … and that potentially brings us right back to the crisis point that we were reaching before the deal was negotiated,” he said.
“In my judgment, the JCPOA, for whatever its limitations, was succeeding on its own terms in blocking Iran’s pathway to producing fossil material for nuclear weapons,” describing the deal featuring “the most intrusive inspections” in the history of arms control.”
Tehran and Washington came close to the verge of war on a number of occasions during President Trump’s reign in the White House, most noticeably with the assassination of top Iranian General Qasem Soleimani at Baghdad International Airport in January of last year. Trump’s bellicose language has been met with equally with threatening behaviour from Tehran, with hardliners and Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) taking the centre stage and leaving little space for negotiation.
Washington withdrew from the landmark deal in 2018 and re-imposed stringent sanctions on Iran in order to bring it to the negotiating table to discuss a number of pressing issues, including missiles and Tehran’s activities in the Middle East – led by Soleimani’s Quds Force.
According to Saeed Jalili, a former nuclear negotiator and a senior advisor to the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei, Washington has sanctioned at least 751 individuals, companies, institutions and foreign nationals working with Iran since it withdrew from the JCPOA, alongside at least another 800 sanctions that were to be lifted as part of the deal.
The White House has pounded the Islamic Republic with waves of fresh sanctions as the outgoing administration prepared to leave office, with Biden’s team supposedly more open to re-entering the deal.
Tehran responded furiously, by taking steps in reducing its commitments under the deal.
Earlier this month, it stated that it has begun enriching uranium at 20 percent, a short technical step from weapons-grade level. However it emphasized that steps were “reversible” if the US returns to the deal and lifts the sanctions.
“We are in no hurry for America to return to the JCPOA, this is not the point at all whether the US returns or not, our logical demand is for the sanctions to be lifted,” Khamenei said on January 8.
One of the main criticisms that President Obama and then-vice president Biden received after the signing of the 2015 nuclear deal was that issues such as missile program and Iran’s activities in the region were not addressed.
Blinken, who served as the Deputy Secretary of State during the Obama administration and played an important role in negotiating the deal, appears to be ready to address these issues.
“The president-elect believes that if Iran comes back to compliance, we would too, but we would use that as a platform with our allies and partners who would once again be on the same side with us to seek a longer and stronger agreement and … to capture these other issues particularly with regards to missiles and Iran’s destabilizing activities,” Blinken told the Senate.
The prospect of the new administration reaching out to Iran once again has sent tremors across the region, in particular in Israel and Saudi Arabia – Iran’s biggest regional foes. Saudi Arabia and Israel say that Iran’s malicious activities in the region have increased dramatically and Washington must be decisive in dealing with Tehran.
“It is also vitally important that we engage on the take-off, not the landing with our allies and with our partners in the region, to include Israel and the Gulf countries,” Blinken added.
President Hassan Rouhani has described Trump presidency as “cursed” and called on the new administration to return to its obligations – which may prompt Iran to do the same.
“These four years of oppression was trampling laws and regulations. Today our expectation from those who are taking power in the White House is to return to their obligations and, if possible, to cleanse all the black spots of the last four years,” Rouhani said.
“If they are honest and abide by law, it is natural that we will abide by all obligations. It is a fact … that the maximum pressure policy has failed 100%,” Rouhani said during the Wednesday cabinet meeting in Tehran.
“Trump is dead but the JCPOA is alive.”
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