The White House is walking a careful line of siding with Iranian protesters against the brutal crackdown while defending diplomatic engagement with Tehran over restarting the Obama-era nuclear agreement.
Women in Iran have been at the forefront of protests since 22-year-old Mahsa Amini died following her detention by the country’s “morality police” for violating hijab rules.
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“We’re alarmed and appalled by reports of security authorities responding to university students’ peaceful protests with violence and mass arrests,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters aboard Air Force One on Monday. “University students are the talented young people who should be the future of Iran.”
“They are rightly [enraged] by the death of Mahsa Amini, the Iranian government’s treatment of women and girls, and the ongoing violent crackdown on peaceful protests,” she said. “This weekend’s crackdowns are precisely the sort of behavior that drives Iran’s talented young people to leave a country by the thousands to seek the dignity and opportunity elsewhere.”
President Joe Biden said in a statement later Monday that he was “gravely concerned about reports of the intensifying violent crackdown on peaceful protestors in Iran, including students and women, who are demanding their equal rights and basic human dignity.”
“This week, the United States will be imposing further costs on perpetrators of violence against peaceful protestors,” Biden continued. “We will continue holding Iranian officials accountable and supporting the rights of Iranians to protest freely.”
When asked about the impact on nuclear negotiations with Iran, however, Jean-Pierre said the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, as the 2015 deal is called, would be pursued as long as there was a national security benefit to the United States.
“But the JCPOA is the best way for us to address the nuclear problem that we see,” she said. “As long as we believe pursuing JCPOA talks is in the U.S. national security interest, we will do so.”
Biden’s top spokeswoman added that “we will continue to use other tools to address other problems with Iran’s behavior, as we have.” Jean-Pierre then invoked former President Ronald Reagan, a conservative icon, in stressing the need to keep talking with Iran.
“Even at the height of the Cold War, as President Reagan was calling the Soviet Union an ‘evil empire,’ he was also engaged in arms control talks because he knew that on the one hand, we had to push back vigorously against the repression of the Soviet Union,” Jean-Pierre said. “And at the same time, we had to protect and defend the security of ourselves, our allies, and our partners.”
Biden, a frequent Reagan critic while serving as a senator from Delaware in the 1980s, has often said the GOP is no longer the party of the 40th president and “is not your father’s Republican Party.”
As chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Biden helped defeat Robert Bork, the first of three nominees for the final Supreme Court vacancy Reagan filled. Justice Anthony Kennedy ultimately was appointed to the seat.
Reagan wrote in his diary that he had attempted to recruit Pete DuPont, then Delaware’s Republican governor, to challenge Biden but could not get him to run for Senate.
The Iran nuclear deal was originally concluded when Biden was serving as vice president under President Barack Obama. It exchanged sanctions relief for restrictions on Iran’s nuclear program, including international inspections. Former President Donald Trump withdrew the U.S. from the pact in 2018.
Defenders of the deal argue it is an important restraint on the Iranian government’s behavior. Critics complain that it does not do enough to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons and does little to curtail the regime’s other malign activities.
Congressional Republicans have also protested that the agreement was not written as a treaty to avoid Senate ratification, which would require GOP votes. Under Obama, nearly every Republican senator opposed the pact.
The Biden administration has sought to reenter the deal but has found negotiations with Iran difficult. Russia is also a party to the deal, and the U.S. has been aiding Ukraine in its defensive war against the Kremlin since the beginning of the Russian invasion in February.
“You’ve heard this from the national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, say just a couple of days ago that even though we are engaged in nuclear negotiations, we’re not going to slow down one inch in our defense and advocacy for the rights of the women and the citizens of Iran,” Jean-Pierre said on Monday.
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Still, Biden has told White House officials his patience for these negotiations is “not eternal.”
“Even as he has fostered and encouraged and pushed for a diplomatic path, [Biden] has conveyed to the rest of the administration that he wants to make sure that we have other available options to us to potentially achieve that solid outcome of the no nuclear weapons capability for Iran,” National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said last month.
