National security adviser Jake Sullivan appeared cool on the possibility of a renewed Iran nuclear deal as President Joe Biden travels to Brussels, Belgium, for high-level talks with NATO, the G-7, and other European Union allies.
“We’ve made progress over the course of the past couple of weeks. There are still some issues left. We’re working on the issues. It’s unclear whether this will come to closure or not,” Sullivan told reporters on Air Force One.
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But Sullivan expressed confidence a reconstructed Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action “would not create a significant economic opportunity for Russia.”
“Russia posed both publicly and privately this proposition that Iran should somehow be entirely carved out of the sanctions regime, which was not accepted by any of the parties,” he said. “So, the only real question of sanctions as it relates to Russia in the context of the JCPOA, it’s about sanctions on Iran being able to, for example, cooperate with the Russian atomic energy authorities to ship out their enriched uranium.”
Earlier this week, Sullivan repeated the United States would not agree to a deal that did not “verifiably block the pathway of Iran to get to a nuclear weapon and put this program back in the box after President Trump let it out of the box when he left the deal back in 2018.”
Briefing while Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced the U.S. had determined Russia was committing war crimes in Ukraine, Sullivan declined to outline any responses to China if it were found to have supported Moscow’s invasion.
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“I don’t want to use the microphone to threaten,” he said. “We have not seen the Chinese government move forward on the supply of weapons,” he added.
