Joe Biden has given a pledge that if the US returns to the Iran nuclear agreement, it will only subsequently leave if Tehran clearly breaks the terms of the deal.
The US president made the commitment, which addresses one of Iran’s key negotiating demands, in a joint statement issued with Germany, France and the UK. The statement followed a meeting on the margins of the G20 in Rome attended by Biden, Germany’s Angela Merkel, France’s Emmanuel Macron and Britain’s Boris Johnson.
The key paragraph of a lengthy statement read: “We welcome President Biden’s clearly demonstrated commitment to return the US to full compliance with the JCPOA [joint comprehensive plan of action] and to stay in full compliance, so long as Iran does the same.”
The pledge was welcomed by Mikhail Ulyanov, the Russian ambassador to multilateral bodies in Vienna, where talks on the future of the Iran nuclear deal have been on pause since June.
Throughout the talks Iran has been seeking an undertaking, ideally legally underpinned, that if Iran returns to the deal, future US administrations will not repeat the walkout of the previous president, Donald Trump, which was accompanied by the imposition of tighter economic sanctions on Iran’s financial institutions and political bodies.
Biden is hamstrung in the value of the guarantees he can give to Iran because the nuclear deal is not a signed treaty endorsed by the US Senate, and he cannot bind the hands of future US administrations.
However, the Biden pledge, underwritten by the main three European powers, may be a sign that the US wants to create a more positive atmosphere before the resumption of the Vienna talks that Iran has – after much pressure and delay – promised will happen at some point in November. There have already been six rounds of talks, but they broke off in June to allow the new Iranian government, led by the president, Ebrahim Raisi, to review its negotiating strategy.
During a speech to the G20 summit in Rome on Sunday, Biden said the US will respond to Iranian attacks on US interests in countries such as Syria, but implied that America preferred using economic leverage rather than military force if Iran refused to return to the negotiating table in Vienna to discuss the future of the 2015 nuclear deal.
He added the US was still paying the price of bad choices made by the Trump administration, including the decision to quit the nuclear deal in 2018. But he insisted he and European leaders at the summit had agreed diplomacy was the best way forward in handling Iran over the future of the nuclear deal. He said: “We came together to reiterate our shared belief that diplomacy is the best way to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon and discussed how best to encourage Iran to resume serious good faith negotiations”.
It is not clear if his remarks means the US would disapprove if Israel launched military strikes against Iran if Israel believed Iran was close to being able to assemble the material needed to make a nuclear weapon.
The US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, said on Sunday that the United States was “absolutely in lock step” with Britain, Germany and France on getting Iran back into a nuclear deal, but added it was unclear if Tehran was willing to rejoin the talks in a “meaningful way”.
“It really depends on whether Iran is serious about doing that,” Blinken said of rejoining the nuclear talks. “All of our countries, working by the way with Russia and China, believe strongly that that would be the best path forward,” he added.
“But we do not yet know whether Iran is willing to come back to engage in a meaningful way,” Blinken said. “But if it isn’t, if it won’t, then we are looking together at all of the options necessary to deal with this problem.”
The shift in the US tone comes a week after a cyber-attack disabled Iran’s petrol stations, an attack attributed on Sunday by Brig Gen Gholamreza Jalali, the head of Iran’s civil defence organisation, to Israel and the US.
The west has become increasingly concerned that Iran’s delay is a subterfuge, and that Tehran has been using the pause to strengthen its stockpile of uranium, weaken the UN nuclear inspections process and become more familiar with the use of advanced centrifuges that can produce highly enriched uranium. The US is concerned that Iran’s “breakout” time for developing a nuclear weapon is reducing and that the value of returning to the deal is fast diminishing. It has been looking at alternative options if it decides that diplomacy will not work.
In a bid to entrench a revived deal further, Iran is also seeking pledges from the EU about its response if the US was to walk out of the deal a second time.
It wants firm pledges that the EU would put more money into Instex, the trading device that the EU set up to ensure Iran and the EU could evade US sanctions. It also wants the EU to allow China and Russia to join the scheme. Instex has largely been inoperable ever since it was set up by the EU with fanfare more than four years ago.
The US E3 joint statement issued in Rome at the margins of the G20 summit also contained no demand that Iran, as part of any agreement, commit to follow-on negotiations about what the west regards as its destabilising behaviour in the region. The Iranian foreign minister, Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, said in an interview published at the weekend that there was no need for the negotiation and the simplest solution was for Biden to issue an executive order saying he was returning to the nuclear deal and lifting sanctions.
Amir-Abdollahian said his administration was embracing a balanced foreign policy, a phrase implying that Iran is going to deprioritise relations with the west, including the main European powers.