Secretary of State John Kerry said Saturday that the U.S. had not tried to leverage cooperation with Iran on fighting the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria to progress on negotiations with Tehran on rolling back its nuclear program.
“There is no linkage whatsoever of the nuclear discussions with any other issue,” he told a news conference in Beijing. “And I want to make that absolutely clear. The nuclear negotiations are on their own. They’re standing separate from anything else. And no discussion has ever taken place about linking one thing to another.”
The Obama administration is on the defensive over a letter President Obama secretly sent to Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in mid-October that appeared to make a connection between cooperation on the U.S.-led fight against the Islamic State to the nuclear talks.
The letter, first reported by the Wall Street Journal Thursday, sparked a firestorm among Republicans and some Democrats angry that the president was secretly trying to engage Iran’s top religious leader who most Washington officials deeply distrust.
The WSJ, citing people briefed on the correspondence, said Obama told Khamenei that any cooperation on the Islamic State hinged on whether the U.S. and Iran could reach an agreement on Tehran’s nuclear program by a Nov. 24 deadline.
