Nearly every Republican senator signed a letter to the Biden administration voicing their opposition to the currently paused nuclear negotiations with Iran.
The group of 49 Republicans, excluding only Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, said they would not support a deal that would “provide substantial sanctions relief in exchange for merely short-term limitations on Iran’s nuclear program.”
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“Republicans will do everything in our power to reverse” a deal that doesn’t block “Iran’s path to a nuclear weapons capability, constrains Iran’s ballistic missile program, and confronts Iran’s support for terrorism,” they wrote.
Citing news reports, the Republicans accused the administration of having “given away the store,” by “appear[ing] to have agreed to lift sanctions that were not even placed on Iran for its nuclear activities in the first place, but instead because of its ongoing support for terrorism and its gross abuses of human rights.”
Josep Borrell, the European Union’s foreign policy chief who acted as coordinator for the talks, announced Friday that the negotiations have been placed on “pause” due to “external factors.”
The pause came as Russia, which is a part of the negotiations, demanded that the new deal shield Iran from sanctions imposed as a result of its war in Ukraine.
“It is not closed. It is not finished. We are urging all parties to do what they need to, and there’s a lot of onus on Iran to decide whether in fact it wants to move forward or not, come into compliance, and ensure that Iran never has a nuclear weapon,” said Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman on Fox News.
Over the weekend, Iran launched a missile attack in Irbil, an area of northern Iraq where U.S. forces are stationed, and Iran claimed responsibility for the attack, saying it was in retaliation for an Israeli strike earlier this week that killed two members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
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“The strikes were an outrageous violation of Iraq’s sovereignty,” said State Department spokesman Ned Price in a statement. “No U.S. facilities were damaged or personnel injured, and we have no indications the attack was directed at the United States.”
The Obama administration brokered the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action in 2015, which decreased sanctions against Iran in exchange for the country reducing its stockpile of enriched uranium needed to fuel nuclear weapons. The Trump administration withdrew the United States from the pact in 2018, with former President Donald Trump arguing that “America will not be held hostage to nuclear blackmail,” while President Joe Biden has sought to reenter the deal.
