US max. pressure on Iran failed to produce results

Testifying at the United States Senate on Tuesday, Antony Blinken said, “We continue to believe that getting back into compliance with the agreement would be the best way to address the nuclear challenge posed by Iran, and to make sure that an Iran doesn’t have a nuclear weapon or the ability to produce one on short notice,” he said, Al Jazeera reported.

US and Iranian diplomats have been negotiating indirectly in Vienna for more than a year to revive the 2015 multilateral pact, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).

On Tuesday, Blinken said the previous administration’s strategy failed to “produce results”.

Former US President Donald Trump withdrew from Iran’s nuclear deal, JCPOA, in May 2018 and unleashed a “maximum pressure” campaign of sanctions against Iran.

But after the last round of talks last month, the push to restore the deal appears to have stalled amid a deadlock over Iran’s demand to remove its Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) from the US list of “foreign terrorist organizations”.