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Biden has confirmed that his administration will not be lifting sanctions imposed upon Iran in order to bring Tehran to the negotiating table for the restoration of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), commonly known as the Iran nuclear deal. https://twitter.com/NorahODonnell/status/1358441977474334721
There are a few things that are ridiculous about this, the first being that the JCPOA does not require that Iran "stop enriching uranium" at all. https://twitter.com/thekarami/status/1358451863260024832
The administration later issued a clarification, but the fact that neither the United States president nor the high-profile reporter interviewing him appear to have been clear on this says a lot about the vapid nature of America's political/media class. https://twitter.com/BahmanKalbasi/status/1358479494546415618
More importantly, this is confirmation that Biden is in effect continuing Trump's Iran policy. Trump began strangling Iran with sanctions to force it to obey US dictates, and Biden is continuing that same strangulation while continuing to demand compliance with its dictates.
The demands might differ, but the effect is the same. The Iranian government has repeatedly made it abundantly clear that it will not be rejoining the JCPOA until the United States comes back into compliance, since it was the US who first abandoned it. https://twitter.com/Antiwarcom/status/1355349616812720129?s=20
Iran claims, correctly, that it was in full compliance with the agreement when the Trump administration unilaterally backed out in May 2018. The argument that it is therefore Washington's responsibility to come back into compliance first is indisputable. https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/news/iran-is-implementing-nuclear-related-jcpoa-commitments-director-general-amano-tells-iaea-board
Why would it re-enter a deal with a government that is clearly acting in bad faith and which could easily just back out and impose civilian-killing sanctions on the nation again? https://caityjohnstone.medium.com/starvation-sanctions-are-worse-than-overt-warfare-b52604b53290
And that's just getting back to the negotiating table for re-entering the deal as it is written. This administration may be planning on trying to use the sanctions it inherited to get even more: https://twitter.com/GarethPorter/status/1353931957550379009
Neither of these things are going to happen. Iran will not modify the deal, and it will not come back into compliance before the government which first abandoned the deal comes back into compliance.
And the Biden administration appears to be perfectly fine with this, reportedly toying with the idea of waiting all the way until after Iran's presidential elections in June to even begin approaching the deal. https://www.axios.com/biden-security-iran-nuclear-program-89c14442-103e-4e7d-8d61-ba81eca91ccc.html
The end result being that we still have a US presidency waging economic warfare upon Iran in exactly the same way it was before the 20th of January. Civilians are still having the life squeezed out of them by a far more powerful nation which does not view them as human beings.
Choosing to continue an immoral course of action is just as immoral as choosing to initiate an immoral course of action. If you're beating someone up and you leave when I get there, and then I choose to continue assaulting that person, I'm just as culpable in that assault as you.
Starvation sanctions are the only type of warfare in which it is considered normal and acceptable to deliberately target a civilian population with deadly force. But it is not normal, and it is not acceptable.
The mass media always fixate on the differences between presidents, but you can learn a whole lot more about what's really going on by looking at their similarities.
