Former Vice President Joe Biden has apparently decided that he would pick Obama administration Deputy Secretary of State Antony Blinken as Secretary of State in a prospective Biden administration. Blinken supports reentering the dangerous Iran nuclear deal which the Obama administration ardently supported and has claimed that Iran was complying with the deal; he also has slammed President Trump for making decisions he felt were best for America’s interests without caring whether other nations were offended, saying, “Everyone’s running in the other direction.”
SCOOP: It's official. Tony Blinken will be Joe Biden's secretary of state, and the announcement is expected to be made on Tuesday, sources tell me, @jeneps and @SalehaMohsin
— Tyler Pager (@tylerpager) November 23, 2020
In an interview with France 24’s Marc Perelman in 2019, Blinken stated:
I think it’s very unfortunate that the United States pulled out of the agreement that Iran for all of the things that we don’t like that it does; was complying with that agreement, with the nuclear agreement. From Iran’s perspective, I imagine that at a certain point, they were no longer getting the economic benefit they bargained for in making the agreement, that they might decide to resume their nuclear program. That seems to be the point that they reached.
Perelman asked, “So Iran has withdrawn from some parts of the agreement; they say we’re still complying with the agreement, are you concerned that this could be the last step before Iran effectively gets out of the agreement?”
Blinken answered:
Well, at some point you’re in the agreement or you’re not in the agreement. They’ve said they’re staying in yet they’re starting to do certain things that are proscribed by the agreement. And so at some point, the other parties, the European parties, Russia, China, will have to decide if Iran is, in fact, still complying with the agreement. But what’s so troubling about this, Mark, is it basically puts us back in the situation we were in, potentially, before the agreement was reached; that is, Iran on the threshold of having the capacity very quickly, to develop a nuclear weapon, and the United States and other countries faced with that, having to decide what to do about it: let them do it or take action to stop them. That was a bad choice and the nuclear agreement created a third choice, which was actually putting real constraints for a long period of time on Iran’s nuclear program. But now that’s falling apart; we’re back to where we started.
He posited, “President Trump decided to tear up an agreement that Iran was actually complying with. And I say this cognizant of all the other things that Iran does, the destabilizing activities throughout the region, support for terrorism, its horrific record on human rights; all of those things that we don’t like and it continues to do, but the one thing it actually was doing in good faith was complying with the nuclear agreement and that’s the one thing we’ve now torn apart.”
Yet The Wall Street Journal reported in August 2015:
Iran so far has refused to allow United Nations inspectors to interview key scientists and military officers to investigate allegations that Tehran maintained a covert nuclear-weapons program, the head of the U.N.’s nuclear watchdog said in an interview Wednesday. … The IAEA and its director-general, Yukiya Amano, have been trying for more than five years to debrief Mohsen Fakhrizadeh-Mahabadi, an Iranian military officer the U.S., Israel and IAEA suspect oversaw weaponization work in Tehran until at least 2003. Mr. Amano said Tehran still hasn’t agreed to let Mr. Fakhrizadeh or other Iranian military officers and nuclear scientists help the IAEA complete its investigation.
In October 2017, famed attorney Alan Dershowiz noted:
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) recently stated that it could not verify that Iran was “fully implementing the agreement” by not engaging in activities that would allow it to make a nuclear explosive device. Yukiya Amano of the IAEA told Reuters that when it comes to inspections, which are stipulated in Section T of the agreement, “our tools are limited.” Amano continued to say: “In other sections, for example, Iran has committed to submit declarations, place their activities under safeguards or ensure access by us. But in Section T, I don’t see any (such commitment).”
It is well established that Tehran has consistently denied IAEA inspectors access to military sites and other research locations. This is in direct contravention to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) and bipartisan legislation set out by Congress, which compels the president to verify that “Iran is transparently, verifiably, and fully implementing the agreement.”
In November 2019, after the U.S. had pulled out of the nuclear deal, AP reported:
Uranium particles of man-made origin have been discovered at a site in Iran not declared to the United Nations, the U.N. atomic watchdog agency said Monday as it confirmed a litany of violations by Tehran of the 2015 nuclear deal. The International Atomic Energy Agency said Iran has begun enriching uranium at a heavily fortified installation inside a mountain, is increasing its stockpile of processed uranium, and is exceeding the allowable enrichment levels. All such steps are prohibited under the agreement Iran reached with world powers to prevent it from building a bomb.
Blinken criticized President Trump’s penchant for making decisions that he considered best for America without the support of other countries, saying, “It’s really not leadership if no one is following and if everyone is running in the other direction.”