A newly resurfaced video shows President Biden telling Republicans what they want to hear.
Of course, White House staffers have walked back the president's remarks before. (RELATED: White House Says Biden Backing Taiwan Isn't Official Policy – China Reacts)
Biden told a woman on the sidelines of a rally before last month's midterm elections that the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), commonly known as the Iran nuclear deal, was dead. When asked, he said that the U.S. wouldn't formally announce the deal's demise “for a lot of reasons.”
The development raises questions about the future of Tehran's nuclear program, as Axios explains:
The woman replied that the Iranian regime doesn't represent the people. “I know they don't represent you. But they will have a nuclear weapon that they'll represent,” he said.
When asked for comment, the White House National Security Council Spokesperson said, “The JCPOA is not our focus right now. It's not on the agenda.”
Axios has more on what the White House is saying:
“We don't see a deal coming together anytime soon,” the spokesperson said, pointing to Iran's crackdown on protesters and support for Russia in the war in Ukraine. “Our focus is on practical ways to confront them in these areas.”
While Biden's remarks seem definitive enough, HotAir‘s Ed Morrisey writes that the European Union (EU) is desperate to revive the deal. “I think that we do not have a better option than the JCPOA to ensure that Iran does not develop nuclear weapons,” remarked the EU's foreign policy chief when asked about the eleventh-hour push. But Morrisey adds that the political capital to kowtow to Tehran isn't there, arguing that the 2015 treaty has failed to check the Islamic Republic in any meaningful way:
All of this might be true if the JCPOA indeed prevented Iran from developing a nuclear weapon. It didn't, however; even if Iran had complied with Barack Obama's deal, it only limited them for ten years in pursuing weapons from their supposedly peaceful nuclear program. There was plenty of evidence that Iran wasn't complying at any point, which Benjamin Netanyahu put together in an extraordinary public briefing in 2018.
Now, with revolution brewing in the streets, the West may have an opportunity to facilitate a real prevention policy. Toppling the mullahs and the IRGC in a popular revolt at least would derail the development of new weapons systems. A successor government based on actual democratic principles would likely be far friendlier to the West, especially if the West refrained from propping the mullahs up as legitimate in the way Obama did in 2009 in the short-lived Green Revolution and again in 2015 with the JCPOA. That gave the mullahs $150 billion in assets to fund outward terrorism and inward police-state expansion, against which the Iranians are now revolting.
The question now is whether or not Biden or his handlers will walk back his remarks.
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I’m not concerned what Pestilence Bidirectional says about anything.
I’d much rather hear what the folks actually running the country (i.e., his puppeteers) have to say about their daily decisions.