In a speech offering 58 minutes of counterprogramming to reports that the U.S. and other nuclear-armed nations were nearing an inflection point in negotiations with Iran over the Islamic republic’s nuclear program, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee called for sanctions on the Islamic Republic.
“Today I call on the Biden administration and the international community to vigorously and rigorously enforce sanctions, which have proven to be among of our most potent tools for impacting Iran’s leaders and the IRGC [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps],” Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) said Tuesday evening on the Senate floor. “We cannot allow Iran to threaten us into a bad deal or an interim agreement that allows it to continue to build its nuclear capacity.”
Menendez spoke a day after major media outlets reported on a background briefing by a State Department official who said that it was do-or-die time for Iran after months of negotiations over returning to compliance with the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action: a politically binding, non-treaty deal the U.S. reached with Tehran in 2015 under then-President Barack Obama and abandoned in 2018 under then-President Donald Trump.
The U.S. has since late November been on the sidelines of a new round of negotiations in Vienna between Iran and members of the five nations with a permanent place on the U.N. Security Council — China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States — plus Germany. These are the so-called P5+1, which along with Iran were the parties to the 2015 nuclear deal.
The 2015 Iran deal sought mainly to constrain Iran’s ability to enrich enough weapons-grade uranium to make a bomb. After the U.S. withdrew from the pact in 2018, Tehran accelerated enrichment and is now widely reported to be less than a month away from obtaining enough uranium for a single bomb.
Menendez complained on Tuesday, as he did in 2015, that the Obama administration’s nuclear deal did not require Iran to disassemble its uranium enrichment equipment.
It was not clear from media reports which core tenants negotiators presented to Iran last week for approval or rejection. Two weeks ago in Foreign Affairs, Iran’s former foreign minister wrote that the Islamic Republic wanted sanctions lifted immediately and would not put either its ballistic missile program or regional military proxies on the negotiating table to entice the U.S. to reenter the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action.
“Iran wants the nuclear deal it made,” reads the headline of former minister Mohammad Javad Zarif’s appeal in Foreign Affairs.
Iran denies it wants the bomb, but the U.S. under the Biden administration has said repeatedly that the knowledge Iran has gained since 2018 cannot be wiped out and that a return to the original terms of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action might not meaningfully delay the time it takes for Iran to go nuclear.
