U.S. President Joe Biden’s refusal to offer upfront sanctions relief to Iran may have angered Tehran’s clerical rulers but it has won some praise at home despite his failure so far to draw Iran into nuclear talks or deter attacks on U.S. forces in Iraq.
“Sensible,” said Elliott Abrams, former President Donald Trump’s special envoy for Iran, of Biden’s unwillingness to give Tehran sanctions relief before any talks on both sides resuming compliance with the 2015 Iran nuclear deal.
“Negotiation is always a give and take but we should not pay them just for the pleasure of their company at the negotiating table,” Abrams said.
Trump bequeathed Biden a nettlesome problem by abandoning the 2015 agreement that limited Iran’s nuclear program to make it harder to develop an atomic bomb – an ambition Tehran denies – in return for the lifting of sanctions.
The result is a diplomatic and military challenge as Biden seeks to revive and eventually broaden the pact to put greater limits on Iran’s nuclear program and its missile development, as well as constrain its regional activities.
That the Democratic president should be commended by a Republican official is striking given the chasm between the U.S. political parties and illustrates Biden’s balancing act as he tries to resuscitate the deal without being pilloried by U.S. conservatives.
Analysts described Biden’s approach to Iran as skillful in keeping the sanctions leverage he inherited from Trump and hence protecting himself from domestic criticism, while taking a harder line on rocket attacks by Iranian proxies in Iraq.
Washington launched air strikes on Iran-backed fighters in Syria on Feb. 25 in response to a Feb. 15 rocket attack on a base hosting U.S. troops in Erbil, Iraq, that killed a non-U.S. contractor and wounded American contractors and a U.S. service member.
U.S. defense officials told Reuters Biden approved the most limited option, saying he aimed to signal to Tehran that Washington would not accept U.S. citizens being killed or injured but also did not want a military escalation.
The defense officials said they did not expect rocket attacks on U.S. personnel in Iraq to stop after one strike in Syria, but said they aimed to set a marker that while diplomacy was the first choice, military tools were available.