Biden caught on camera admitting Iran nuclear deal is ‘dead’

End of JCPOA talks raises questions about future of Washington-Tehran relations

The Iran nuclear deal is “dead”, and not coming back, according to President Joe Biden.

That was Mr Biden’s characterisation of the future of the 2015 agreement in October in video taken from the rope line of a campaign event in California, recently obtained and posted online by a man who identified himself as a software engineer at Google.

In the video, Mr Biden is asked about the issue by an unidentified woman on the rope line. He states in response that the talks have ceased and that the nuclear deal will not be renegotiated, while adding that for political reasons his administration will not declare that reality publicly.

“It is dead, but we are not gonna announce it. Long story,” the president tells the woman, who is heard warning the president that Iran’s government will continue seeking a nuclear weapon. Tehran is known to be seeking such technology as a means of an insurance policy against attempts to overthrow the nation’s authoritarian regime.

A spokesperson for the White House National Security Council seemingly confirmed that the Biden administration had moved on from the effort to resume participation by both sides of the accord in a statement to Axios about the newly surfaced video.

"The JCPOA is not our focus right now. It’s not on the agenda," said the spokesperson.

But critics of the Biden administration’s approach to Iran are less sure that the White House has given up on one of the signature foreign policy achievements of the Obama administration.

John Bolton, national security adviser to former President Donald Trump, claimed in a statement to The Independent that the White House under Mr Biden would never give up on efforts to convince Tehran to negotiate a return to that 2015 agreement aimed at blocking Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons.

“For the Biden administration, the JCPOA has theological significance,” he said. “For them, the dream will never die.”

The White House had long been under pressure to abandon the deal, with centrist Democrats joining Republicans in opposition to the agreement in favour of one with tougher terms and conditions for Iranian participation. Republicans aligned with the Trump administration (and some others) favour a total halt to official negotiations with the Iranian government and the resumption of a so-called “maximum pressure” campaign of sanctions and other measures aimed at crippling Iran economically.

“The unraveling of JCPOA began with the nationwide uprising in 2017 and now we see it in the daily anti-regime protests,” Dr Ramesh Sepehrrad of the Organization of Iranian American Communitites told The Independent in a statement Monday.

“With JCPOA or without JCPOA, the people of Iran are going to overthrow this regime,” she continued. “The time has come for the EU and US to recognize the Iranian revolution and its deep roots in four decades of popular resistance.”

Progressives, meanwhile, have been largely quiet about the issue of Iran and have largely shyed away from calling publicly for the Biden administration to engage with Tehran at a more significant level or to specifically aim to resume the JCPOA.