Iran: Nuclear talks doomed without Biden guarantee

Iran’s top national security official said that talks to rejoin the 2015 nuclear deal are doomed without “guarantees” from President Biden. 

“The U.S. president, lacking authority, is not ready to give guarantees,” Ali Shamkhani, who heads Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, said Wednesday, according to Reuters.

“If the current status quo continues, the result of negotiations is clear,” he continued.

Shamkhani’s comments come as Iran is expected to give a date for rejoining negotiations to return to the nuclear deal, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. 

Ali Bagheri, Iran’s deputy foreign minister, said last week that the country would announce an exact date for returning to negotiations before the end of November. 

Talks that began in April for returning to the deal were halted in June after the election of Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi, who is a hard-line critic of the West.

As part of the Obama-era deal, Iran agreed to dismantle much of its nuclear program and open its facilities to inspections in exchange for sanctions relief. 

Former President Trump pulled the U.S out of the deal in 2018, saying that it would not stop Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons. Tehran stopped complying with the terms of the deal a year later and has said it would not return until the U.S. lifts sanctions put in place under the Trump administration.

As Reuters noted, Iran also wants the U.S. to guarantee that it would not backtrack on the agreement again.

The U.S., on the other hand, has insisted that Tehran begin complying with the terms of the deal before it gets sanctions relief.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken told CBS’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday that the U.S. is looking into “other options” in case Tehran is not “prepared to engage quickly in good faith.”