Joe Biden Officially Offers to Restart Nuclear Talks with Iran – World News

Washington: The United States took an important step Thursday toward restoring the nuclear deal with Iran that Donald Trump’s administration left the administration, offering to join European nations in what would be the first substantial diplomacy with Tehran in more than four years, officials said. Biden administration.

In a series of moves aimed at fulfilling one of President Joe Biden’s most important campaign promises, the administration backed down from an effort by the Trump administration to restore United Nations sanctions on Iran. That effort had separated Washington from its European allies.

And at the same time, Secretary of State Antony Blinken told Europe’s foreign ministers in a call Thursday morning that the United States would join them in seeking to restore the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran, which he said that “was a key achievement of multilateral diplomacy. ”

Hours later, Enrique Mora, undersecretary-general for Political Affairs of the European Union, appealed to the original signatories of the nuclear agreement to save him from “a critical moment.”

“Intense conversations with all participants and with the United States,” Mora said on Twitter. “I’m ready to invite you to an informal meeting to discuss the way forward.”

But it was unclear whether the Iranians would agree. The first hurdle to restoring the deal may be a politically sensitive dance of who goes first. And the Biden administration has other goals that include extending and deepening the deal in an effort to curb Iran’s growing missile capacity and its continued support for terrorist groups and the Syrian government of Bashar Assad.

Biden has said he would lift the sanctions imposed by President Donald Trump only if Iran returns to the nuclear production limits it observed until 2019.

Under the original 2015 deal, Iran shipped 97 percent of its nuclear fuel out of the country and agreed to strict limits on a new product that would essentially guarantee that it would take a year or more to produce enough material for a single weapon. In return, world powers lifted international sanctions that had suffocated the Iranian economy. But when he took office, Trump unilaterally restored US sanctions, arguing that the deal was flawed.

Iran has said the United States was the first to violate the terms of the 2015 nuclear deal and that it would enforce it again only after the United States reversed course and allowed it to sell oil and bank around the world. A senior official in the Biden administration said late Thursday that closing that gap would be a “painstaking” process.